Violent hospitality: food, racism and state-corporate control of asylum seekers in the UK

This article subjects hotel food provided to people seeking asylum in the United Kingdom to critical criminological scrutiny – tracing how colonial power is reproduced through contemporary migration governance. Introducing and applying the new concept of violent hospitality, it demonstrates how food, conventionally framed as care and offered to show generosity, functions instead as punishment, exclusion, and racialized and gendered violence. Although scholarship on borders and carceral control has expanded criminological theorization to address the criminalization of migration as racialized violence, food as an everyday mechanism of violent racialized governance remains marginal within criminology. Drawing on thematic analysis of sixteen interviews with asylum seekers and charity workers, alongside letters from health professionals and photographic evidence, the article reveals how hotel food manufactures insecurity, erodes bodily autonomy, and infringes reproductive justice. While food can sustain solidarity within migrant communities, within the British asylum system it is weaponized through carceral and colonial logics that discipline bodies through deprivation and surveillance, consolidating asylum hotels as sites that reconstitute sustenance as a mechanism of border violence.