Day 232, Year of #Mygration: The Potential of Sanctuary

Today we conclude highlights of Dr Agnes Czajka's publications with another very topical concept – Refugee Sanctuary. This important concept has featured in debates especially in the US in the context of Sanctuary Cities. The book chapter reviewed today is titled: The potential of sanctuary: acts of sanctuary through the lens of camp. The article was originally published in Sanctuary Practices in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship and Social Movements.

The emergence of refugee welcome initiatives in the UK and further afield in response to the recent migration crisis highlights the fact that in general people care about the plight of refugees even when the populist rhetoric in the media suggests otherwise. Countless stories of people who travelled and volunteered in Greece and Calais embody the spirit of welcome and sanctuary. This chapter forms part of an edited volume that examines the practice of providing sanctuary to asylum seekers. The ancient tradition of sanctuary was revived in the last decades of the 20th century, and arguably, is again becoming an increasingly popular method for resisting the growing tide of deportations in present-day Europe and North America.  

The edited volume situates contemporary sanctuary practices in international, theoretical and historical perspectives, highlighting their conceptual and practical complexities and variations. The chapter focuses on whether modern sanctuary practices reproduce the discourses and technologies of the state, or contain critical, transformative potential. 

Much of the critical literature on contemporary sanctuary has argued that sanctuary practices replicate dominant discourse on refugees, ones that manufacture a distinction between legitimate and illegitimate refugees, and constitute the former as vulnerable, apolitical supplicants. The chapter, however, argues that a critical, transformative potential also underlies practices of the sanctuary. This potential, it argues, is rooted in the challenge sanctuary practices present to the state's attempt to monopolise territorial sovereignty and govern the political. The chapter thus suggests that while certain practices of sanctuary providers and advocates should be challenged, sanctuary's promise lies in its potential to disrupt the state's attempt to monopolise territorial sovereignty and ways of being political. 

Read the original chapter by Dr Agnes Czajka