Drawing the borders of (non-)religious identity: the bureaucratisation of apostate refugee claims in the UK

Refugee Status Determination (RSD) processes in the United Kingdom (UK) function as a bordering mechanism within postcolonial governmentality. While scholarship has explored asylum bureaucracies and their organisational logics, credibility assessments, and decision-making, we know little about how these dynamics shape claims involving non-religion and how such complex identities become ‘bureaucratised’ through RSD. Drawing on analysis of international human rights law, national asylum policies, and narratives from refugees and human rights advocates (n = 34), this article examines how non-religious identities are included, excluded, and rendered ‘legible’ within the asylum system. To do so, I develop a novel analytical framework of the ‘coloniality of bureaucracy’ by combining decolonial perspectives with organisational sociology. This framework demonstrates, first, that contemporary asylum processes are fundamentally shaped by colonial histories embedded in decision-making hierarchies and organisational practices. Second, the bureaucratisation of identity serves as an exclusionary bordering strategy, where RSD processes construct hierarchical categories of belief that reproduce racialised, colonial imaginaries. By focusing on non-religion, an overlooked category of refugee status, this paper reveals how the administration of asylum is a site where (un)official knowledge is continuously (re)produced, demonstrating how bureaucratic procedures actively generate borders, inequalities, and forms of precarity within contemporary asylum systems.