Theorising legal gaps geographically: exploring the transition from asylum-seeker to refugee in the UK.

For many asylum seekers in the United Kingdom, being awarded refugee status signals the end of a prolonged period of waiting. At this point, they and their dependants are predominantly given permission to stay in the United Kingdom for five years. However, when a positive decision is granted, a new refugee has limited time before their existing government support (housing, finance) terminates. This transition is termed the ‘move-on period’, and, at the time of research, new refugees had only 28 days to navigate this change. Whilst civil society groups argue that the period following a positive decision poses urgent political questions, the legal gap between these two systems of governance has yet to garner significant academic attention. Scholarship has often been epistemically siloed into research looking at the governance and lived experiences of asylum seekers or the challenges and integration of refugees; the transition, or ‘gap’ between these legal categories has yet to receive sustained analysis. Building upon work on legal edges (Jeffrey 2019) this paper proposes a geographical reading of legal gaps, emerging from and speaking beyond the specifics of new refugees. It explores the construction and governance of the move-on period, together with the role of material technologies in paradoxically mediating and creating this gap. Bringing these two themes together, the paper contributes to debates on the role of materials in the governance of forced migrants and puts forward a relational theorising of legal ‘gaps’.