When, where, and how do asylum seekers encounter the state? Anyone seeking asylum in the Global North might meet state authorities of the country where they want to apply for international protection long before arriving at its borders. However, if the state often becomes “very present” by transcending its geopolitical margins in border control, once asylum seekers have managed to cross into national territory, the state frequently vanishes. Insufficient information, opaque proceedings, difficulties in reaching state agencies, which dramatically increased with the COVID pandemic, often translate into a denial of asylum seekers' rights and their exclusion from welfare programs . Moreover, following a widespread tendency to outsource public services, access to asylum and related welfare programmes are being increasingly mediated by a range of nonstate actors (such as NGOs, activist groups, companies, and individuals) acting as state agents. Drawing on the analysis of ethnographic results from Spain and Italy, this article proposes the concept of “ghost bureaucracy” to theorise the street-level bureaucrats from their absence and explore asylum seekers’ encounters with a seemingly powerful and omnipresent but unreachable state through closed offices, digital bureaucracy and third-party actors.

Providing face-to-face support to victims entails one the most intense stress- and trauma-laden exchanges of law enforcement tasks, which frequently triggers long lasting negative effects on police officer’s psychological wellbeing. When exploring this phenomenon, police resilience is often interpreted as police officers’ and organization’s capacity to react and recover from negative experiences and impediments, and as such it may be perceived as both a trait and a trainable and promotable skill. Yet, in very recent times, police resilience has faced new or transformed challenges due to the COVID-19 pandemic, as victims, citizens, and public institutions have encountered new needs and situations. Drawing from a unique qualitative, in-depth research with police officers that provide support to victims of gender-based and domestic violence, this paper analyzes officers’ needs and challenges regarding their interactions with victims, colleagues, superiors, and other occupational demands, as they interplay into stress and trauma that may lead to burnout and compassion fatigue. Illustrated with the empirical findings of the case study of the Catalonia’s Mossos d’Esquadra police corps, the paper explores how officers negotiate individuals’ expectations, needs, and procedures signals towards potential challenges and threats to their psychological wellbeing with implications for police forces and other public and private institutions. The specific needs and demands of the participants’ policing, related to support to gender-based and domestic violence, presents an in-depth analysis of how stress and trauma are understood and experienced from the police officers’ perspectives.

Whilst torture is an age-old phenomenon, prevalent in Western societies since the oldest available records, the 20th Century brought about significant transformations in its conceptualisation. Torture remains the subject of complex and controversial debates, both from academic, political, and legal approaches. Dwelling on the current problematizations of this concept that recognise torture within the logic of its social production, this text explores the connection -and its omission- between state violence and torture against migrants. The chapter examines the case of the Spanish state’s failure to protect migrant victim of torture’s rights, as well as the physical aggression at borders, by which migrants are subjected to different forms of violence by the migration control apparatus.

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