62 JUDITH BEYER that asylum procedure de-individualises all participants, including the judges who speak in the name of ‘the law’. The consequence of this asymmetrical encounter is of course felt most by the applicant who disappears behind the ‘case’ they help constitute unknowingly. In drawing on this ‘case material’ as a country of origin expert, I have discussed my ethical predicament of not wanting to contribute further to this asymmetry by obtaining informed consent from an individual who has ceased to figure as such in the course of the asylum procedure. I have further laid out that I do consider the role of applied anthropology in this area of expertise useful when it is able to discuss the efficacy of legal categorisation itself. Whether anthropologists can have an impact on judicial reasoning or not has less to do with the quality of their reports than with the way the law is structured. In the end, it is the repealed dismissal of an asylum claim that proves whether the material provided by anthropologists will have been considered ‘evidence’ enough. When it comes to applied anthropology in the asylum context, it is not important whether our knowledge is openly acknowledged but whether it is allowed to make a difference. Acknowledgements I thank Felix Girke, Insa Lee Koch, the participants of the Social Anthropology Research Colloquium at the University of Konstanz, the two anonymous peer reviewers and the journal editor for their helpful comments and suggestions. JUDITH BEYER is Full Professor of Social and Political Anthropology at the University of Konstanz in Germany. She specialises in legal and political anthropology and has conducted long-term ethnographic fieldwork in Central Asia and Southeast Asia. She has published two monographs based on this research, The Force of Custom (Pittsburgh University Press, 2016) and Rethinking Community in Myanmar (University of Hawai’i Press, 2024). In recent years, she has carried out research with expert activists in Europe in the fields of human rights law, asylum and statelessness. Email: judith.beyer@uni-konstanz.de; ORCID: 0009-0009-2593-6968. Notes 1. The Labour Party. X social media post, 10 February 2025. https://x.com/UKLabour/status/18​ 88912833854758979 (accessed 23 May 2025). 2. See, for example, Coffey (2003), Kobelinski (2015), Mitsch (2020), Mitsch and Reiling (2018), Pine (2020), Rose and Given-Wilson (2021), Vetters and Foblets (2016) and Zenker (2016). 3. Only the so-called de jure stateless people, who are formally recognised as stateless by a state, enjoy encompassing rights comparable to those of other officially recognised refugees and receive official documentation. 4. Official statistics provided by the British Government. Spreadsheet ‘Asylum claims and initial decisions detailed datasets, year ending March 2025’. https://www.gov.uk/government/statisti​ cal-data-sets/immigration-system-statistics-data-tables#asylum (accessed 25 May 2025).