This article examines the time politics of asylum in the United Kingdom from the 1990s. It argues that the new phase of globalization of migration has challenged the nation-state’s traditional form of control over population movements in its territory. In the context of asylum policy in the UK, the state’s response has been one of attempting to reorder and re-synchronize the movements and fates of a fast-increasing number of asylum seekers. The main strategy has been to speed up the asylum process through new legislation and administrative procedures. The article analyses this strategy and examines the limits to this time politics of speed, arguing for new ways of appropriating a global simultaneity made possible by technological transformation in the light of nonsimultaneous processes unleashed by the global movement of people.
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