What is life like for people waiting for asylum? How do refugees make their days meaningful when staying in provisional accommodation with an uncertain future? This fascinating ethnographic study of everyday life among young male asylum seekers in northern Italy explores some answers to these questions. Paolo Boccagni’s central argument—and the book’s title—is taken from a remark made by one of these asylum seekers in response to a query about his day: “I’m doing nothing.” It is this apparent “nothingness” of asylum seekers’ routines—this waiting and sense of limbo—that forms the focus of the book. Of course, it is not a story of “nothing” at all; as Boccagni argues, “nothingness” conceals complex social practices through which his interlocutors struggle to make their way in the world. At the heart of this study is the idea that asylum seekers, while waiting for a more stable legal status, are struggling for relevance. They look for meaning, they seek control over those areas of their life where they might exert some power, and they try to imagine what life might look like after the period of limbo is over.

Boccagni’s study is based on four years of immersive ethnographic fieldwork in a temporary housing facility in Italy (2018–2022). This included hundreds of encounters and observations with predominantly West African and Pakistani men. In his book, the housing facility itself—as a building—becomes a central character, an actor shaping the residents’ lives and identities. Boccagni treats it not merely as a setting but as an infrastructure that “does things to those who inhabit it” (p. 5). The building was once a motel then became student accommodation, and during his fieldwork, it housed around 70 asylum seekers who typically stayed for one or two years. Its corridors, shared kitchens, and narrow bedrooms imposed both proximity and surveillance. Over time, it absorbed traces of its inhabitants: their smells, objects, graffiti, and makeshift decorations all becoming a repository of suspended lives.

In this sense, the center embodies the contradictions of the asylum system, which is captured in this book through chapters titles that indicate an opposition: inside/outside, still/moving, present/absent, dirty/clean, home/nonhome. Boccagni describes these as “fields of ambivalence” (p. 29). They are all, he argues, dimensions that shape the lived experience of asylum. Each chapter investigates these facets of social life—which, he suggests, move from the spatial and temporal to the existential—through which asylum seekers live under contradictory pressures. Together they build a picture of a system that is at once protective and immobilizing, intimate and institutional, welcoming and controlling—a system in which residents navigate the “nothingness” of their existence by creating microthresholds of meaning in the spaces they inhabit.

The concept that sets this book apart is that of “relevance.” This is what Boccagni’s interlocutors seek. He defines it as a social and moral process that involves foregrounding certain aspects of one’s material and social world while leaving others in the background (p. 24). It is, he stresses, a practice—a way of deciding what matters. The summary on the back of the book describes it as a process that entails carving out “meaning, control, and direction” from “legal and existential liminality.” For Boccagni, the struggle for relevance is always animating everyday life in the asylum center. In other words, the residents’ condition of “doing nothing” is not passivity at all but an ongoing negotiation of what counts as meaningful. Relevance operates on multiple scales here. At the personal level, it is about what one can immediately control: one’s body, bed, or daily routine. At the social level, it involves relationships and recognition, whether from peers (through ideas of respect, reputation, masculinity) or family (through remittances and imagined futures). Finding relevance ultimately involves foregrounding—deciding what deserves attention, care, and effort when so much of life is externally controlled. It is about making things matter when one’s wider condition is threatened by insignificance.

I found this as an interesting and productive concept, particularly in relation to other related ideas, such as autonomy. It seems to me that the idea of “relevance” is all about making life livable within a constrained system—the way that people take control where they can, even if only on the scale of their bodies, beds, or shared rooms. It is about what people invest with significance when so much lies outside of their control. Autonomy is mentioned a few times in the book but generally in relation to people’s longer-term aspirations – as “a marker of male adulthood” (pp. 15, 27, 50). In other words, autonomy is presented as stage to be reached, yet always out of reach for residents in the center (p. 78). I found this curious, because it suggests that autonomy is an idealized state when many have described it as a process rather than a destination: something we can acquire by degrees, held in part rather than in whole. Indeed, Boccagni’s “struggle for relevance” could be framed as a process of carving out of moments of autonomy in the face of constraint.

The strength of this book lies in the unfolding of this argument through deep engagement with a single place and all its complexities. As a reader, we gain a detailed understanding of the setting and the characters, an immersion that makes ethnography particularly powerful. The book offers a twist, too, by focusing our attention on something relatively neglected, something that seems initially empty and banal—that is, the idea of “nothing” at all. This is an important corrective when—as Boccagni suggests in the introduction—so much literature relating to refugees focuses on carcerality in asylum and refugee camps, on states of exception and all-encompassing systems of control. Such work often overlooks the more complex and mundane realities that this book explains with great nuance. Boccagni not only offers us a subtle focus on that sense of nothingness but also a fascinating commentary of small but significant elements of life. I found the chapter on cleanliness especially illuminating, with its sustained focus on the relationship between the building’s inhabitants and its staff. The narrative shows how certain staff translate institutional power into routine moral regulation, describing cleanliness as “a preliminary exercise in civic integration” (p. 130). Here, too, Boccagni demonstrates an openness to nuance—not just among residents but also among staff. His acknowledgements section stresses that this is not a simplistic world: “Contrary to an ideologically charged view of an asylum center as a carceral world, readable through a powerful-versus-powerless binary account, my fieldwork reveals interesting, sometimes unsettling, commonalities across the divide” (p. 10).

These are all great features of this book, which will appeal to the qualitative and anthropologically minded. But such nuance might leave certain readers struggling for air. Some political scientists—if they are looking for a monograph with a generalizable theory or systematic set of analytical categories—might feel they are drowning in complexity. Even those of a more ethnographic bent may find too much ambivalence here. I found the structure to be interesting and fruitful, but some may worry that the focus does not quite settle. The book could have been framed more explicitly around some overarching questions or a clear sense of a puzzle, but there is nevertheless a great deal of significance here for the study of politics and migration. In a field that too often focuses on scenes of flight and border spectacle, Boccagni succeeds in turning our attention to the long, uneventful years that follow arrival. The idea of “doing nothing,” as a state actively produced by the asylum regime—even as a mode of governance—is productive and transferable to other settings. Indeed, the book contributes to a growing political sociology of asylum as a technology of suspension, as well as to literature on how agency operates under structural constraint. It also has implications for theories of everyday resistance and subject formation because, rather than viewing asylum seekers as passive recipients of state power, Boccagni shows how they reconstitute moral worth and political visibility from below. Above all, he succeeds in showing how refugees seek to undo that sense of suspension—the way they strive to “produce relevance” in a condition of institutional irrelevance.