Desperately Seeking Certainty? The Case of Asylum Applicants and People Planning an Assisted Suicide in Switzerland

Abstract

Uncertainty is often deemed to be a quintessential fact of life. The social scientific literature often references a generalised or ‘global’ uncertainty, akin to a worldview. Far fewer studies, however, discuss the specific effects of ‘event’ focused uncertainty: how it is managed by groups and individuals, or how this type of uncertainty relates to the concepts of risk, trust, hope and time. This article seeks to identify and analyse key aspects of the condition of uncertainty through an empirical exploration of two very different case studies: asylum applicants waiting for the state to decide whether to grant them the right to remain in the UK, and people with chronic or life-limiting illness who want to hasten their own death with the help of a Swiss right-to-die organisation. In both cases, participants experienced a heightened state of uncertainty because of specific and substantial threats to their well-being: deportation, and protracted suffering through illness. In both cases, the acquisition of knowledge was considered to aid predictions about future events. However, both sets of individuals encountered barriers to acquiring the right kind of knowledge - knowledge which was trusted to be accurate or which came with a guarantee. While all the individuals were constrained in their ability to act to relieve their uncertainty, they found limited ways of doing so. Knowledge and action are thereby found to be crucial to the condition of uncertainty and to the means of overcoming it through restoring a sense of control.

Old age rational suicide

“…Hearing such stories prompts the question of whether such people's death decisions are prompted by present suffering or fears of future suffering. Clearly, uncertainty about future living arrangements and future quality of death play a part in people's decision to end their own life or to opt for an assisted suicide (Richards & Rotter, 2013).…”

Uncertainty in situations of forced displacement:Acritical interpretative synthesis of refugee literature

“…Notifications of uncertainty in scholarly refugee literature are omnipresent. Authors refer to refugee situations as “conditions of uncertainty” (Datta, , p. 52), issues “surrounded by uncertainty” (Jaji, , p. 184; Richards & Rotter, , p. 28; White, , p. 315), or situations of “constant uncertainty” and “ongoing uncertainty” (Kenny & Procter, , p. 5). Uncertainty is considered “natural” (Moretti, , p. 82), “existential” (Jaji, , p. 177), or “radical” (Ilcan & Rygiel, , p. 337) in refugee situations and experienced “to a degree unparalleled elsewhere” (Sayigh, , p. 37).…”

“…Uncertainty is considered “natural” (Moretti, , p. 82), “existential” (Jaji, , p. 177), or “radical” (Ilcan & Rygiel, , p. 337) in refugee situations and experienced “to a degree unparalleled elsewhere” (Sayigh, , p. 37). Other authors write about a “state of uncertainty” (Richards & Rotter, , p. 3; Sampson, Gifford, & Taylor, , p. 15), or “opaque” situations “dominated and overshadowed by arbitrariness and uncertainty” (Beneduce, , p. 10). Refugees are considered “chronically in limbo” (Becker, Beyene, & Ken, , p. 145), “stuck in a present that they do not want to inhabit, awaiting a future they cannot reach” (Brun, , p. 19).…”

“…Afifi et al (, p. 495) define uncertainty as “a lack of confidence in one's ability to predict future outcomes” and operationalise this in their empirical study as “a sense of not knowing what will happen” in relation to “personal and family security” and “macro security” issues (p. 496). Richards and Rotter (, p. 1) relate uncertainty to “knowledge we have at our disposal at a particular point in time which enables us to make predictions about the future.” Other authors draw on Turner's notion of “liminality” to explain how refugees are “in a state of being in between, both in a temporal and spatial sense” (El‐Sharaawi, , p. 46), “no longer classified and not yet classified” (Turner, 1967: 95–6 in Beneduce, ), and in an “indefinite and potentially permanent state of precariousness” (Sampson et al, , p. 1). Most authors, however, do not define nor theoretically situate the concept of uncertainty, and it remains rather vague what is actually understood by uncertainty in refugee situations.…”

Dying to go to court: Demanding a legal remedy to end-of-life uncertainty

“…The unpredictability of the progressive symptoms of her disease was causing Debbie ontological insecurity (Giddens 1990;Richards and Rotter 2013). As Toombs (1995: 20) points out, for people with progressive disability, time may be disturbed in that the future, rather than the present, assumes overriding significance.…”