When I first received a request to review this title, my initial thought was that it would be a text that spoke only to a marginal aspect of the debate on access to asylum in industrialised states. But then I received an e-mail from a UK-based law firm: ‘Dear Dr. Milner, We act for the above-named in connection with her asylum appeal …’ In fact, in the time between the invitation and submitting this review, I received four requests to provide expert testimony in relation to the asylum claim of an individual from sub-Saharan Africa. From this experience, and a close reading of this excellent volume, I have come to appreciate the increased importance of ‘expert’ testimony in asylum procedures and the range of challenges it poses for scholars and the African Studies community.

As outlined in the introduction, ‘this volume constitutes the first attempt to establish a rigorous analytical framework for interpreting the transformative effect of [a] new reliance on expertise’ in the refugee status determination process in a growing number of states (p. 3). It provides a compelling introduction to the topic, and is important reading for those concerned with access to asylum and refugee protection in the global North, scholars of encounters between bureaucratic processes in the global North and ideas of ‘Africa’, along with any African Studies scholar who receives a request to provide expert testimony. It serves as an important foundation for future research, and as a call to the African Studies Association and other professional associations, to understand the prevalence of this practice and to provide some guidance to its members on the implications of both participation and non-participation.

At the core of the volume is an understanding of the changing experience of individuals from sub-Saharan Africa who seek asylum in a growing range of states in North America, Europe and elsewhere in the global North. Roughly a third of the world's refugees are to be found in Africa – an estimated 3 million refugees in 2015. Given the particular nature of legal regimes in Africa and the provisions of the 1969 OAU Convention Governing the Specific Aspects of Refugee Problems in Africa, more than 80% of these refugees do not benefit from refugee status as individuals. Instead, they are recognised as refugees prima facie, having fled situations of generalised violence and persecution. Many states in Africa allow refugees to remain with this status on a temporary basis. With the average duration of a refugee situation now standing at 20 years, many refugees in Africa can remain in exile for a generation without ever benefiting from an individual refugee status.

If and when these individuals go on to seek recognition as refugees in countries such as the UK, US, Canada, Australia, Sweden or Germany, however, they need to demonstrate that they have an individual claim to refugee status. In most instances, this is understood according to the terms of the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, which specifies that a refugee is someone outside their country of origin due to a well-founded fear of persecution due to their race, religion, nationality, membership in a particular social group or their political opinion. But what is a well-founded fear? What constitutes persecution? How can a court in Montréal or Minneapolis understand the treatment of particular group in a given African context? Does the individual before the court present a well-founded fear of persecution, and is thus eligible for refugee status and the associated benefits of status? Or should their claim be rejected, and the individual potentially returned to their country of origin?

As detailed in African Asylum at a Crossroads, ‘experts’ are increasingly being asked to answer these questions, and thus contribute to life or death decisions affecting individuals. This raises two sets of important questions.

First, how does the role of the expert represent new forms of knowledge production about Africa and constitute a new areas or site of enquiry? The volume explains the factors that have given rise to demand for expert testimony in the determination of status for African asylum seekers. This is addressed both as a practice on its own within the refugee status determination systems of many states in the global North and as an opportunity to explore the representation of ‘Africa’ in bureaucratic processes. For example, Luongo's chapter on the treatment of refugee claims associated with witchcraft provides a compelling consideration of the perception and representation of various cultural practices in diverse processes. Likewise, the chapter by Bohmer and Shuman illustrates the power of documents, assumptions relating to the possession of documents, and understandings of the meaning of documents in situations of contested identity in Africa. In these and other chapters we see the way that the provision of expert testimony serves to both interpret and create, and the role the refugee status determination process can play in the fixing of new meanings, understandings and categories. In this way, the process becomes an important site of enquiry on the production and reproduction of understandings of ‘Africa’.

Second, how do we understand the ‘task of the expert’ and the role of experts as a new area of practice and professional responsibility for African Studies scholars? The volume highlights the productive power of the ‘expert’ and questions relating to the potential tensions between knowledge and the use of knowledge. McDougall's chapter, in particular, points to the ‘elephant in the room’ (p. 130) in discussing the ethical tensions between providing knowledge in the context of a constructed determination process and resisting the artificialities and power relations inherent in the determination process itself. This is compounded by Campbell's chapter on the UK experience and the fact that ‘adjudicators have promulgated decisions that provide a semblance of legal stability when, in fact, they arrive at radically different conclusions, often erroneously, on the same issues’ (p. 117). Likewise, Hepner's consideration of ‘the expert as critically engaged activist’ (pp. 229–33) draws the contours of the range of challenges and opportunities raised by participation in the process as an expert witness.

This remains the core challenge that remains unresolved in the volume, and needs to be the focus on discussion and debate within the field: can there be ethical guidelines to inform participation or non-participation in status determination procedures as an ‘expert’? This question should be the source of informed debate within our professional associations. Ultimately, African Asylum at a Crossroads is important reading for those interested in the changing course of refugee protection in the global North and those interested in the representation of ‘Africa’ in and through bureaucratic processes – but it is especially important reading for anyone who receives an invitation to serve as an expert witness and is not sure how to reply.