Description
This paper makes the case for a socio-legal approach to refugee law through reflections on qualitative fieldwork with refugee communities and institutional actors in Germany. Drawing on interviews with refugees, government officials, NGOs and international organisations, it explores how formal categories of status, integration and protection are interpreted, negotiated, and, at times, resisted in everyday life. The analysis reflects on the practical and ethical dimensions of conducting empirical legal research – from gaining access through personal and professional networks to navigating gendered and linguistic dynamics with participants and interpreters and adapting to moments of uncertainty that reshaped the course of the study. These encounters reveal the limits of text-based legal analysis for understanding protection as experienced and contested, and show how law is lived through affective, relational and institutional practices. The paper argues that socio-legal inquiry is essential to understanding how refugee law works in practice. It brings to light the power relations, institutional routines and emotional dynamics that shape legal outcomes, and calls for a more reflexive awareness of how methods, ethics and knowledge production intersect.
