Abstract
Introduces the central problematic animating this book: how hospitality offered through the sanctuary city challenges yet also extends a hostile state of deferral.
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Notes
Sylvie Da Lomba’s ‘Legal Status and Refugee Integration: a UK Perspective,’ Journal of Refuge Studies 23, no. 4 (2010), 415–436.
Also see: Margaret S. Malloch and Elizabeth Stanley, ‘The detention of asylum seekers in the UK: representing risk, managing the dangerous,’ in Punishment & Society 7, no. 1 (2005), 53–71;
Alice Bloch and Liza Schuster, ‘At the Extremes of Exclusion: deportation, detention and dispersal,’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 3 (2005), 491–512
For a discussion of the dispersal program in the UK see: Patricia Hynes, The Dispersal and Social Exclusion of Asylum Seekers. Between Liminality and Belonging. (Bristol: Policy Press, 2011);
Dallal Stevens, UK Asylum Law and Policy. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives. (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 2004).
Karen Wren, ‘Supporting asylum seekers and refugees in Glasgow: the role of multi-agency networks,’ Journal of Refugee Studies 20, no. 3 (09/2007).
Duncan Sim and Alison Bowes, ‘Asylum seekers in scotland: the accommodation of diversity,’ Social & Policy Administration 41, no. 7. (September 2007), 729–746.
See: Patricia Hynes, The Dispersal and Social Exclusion of Asylum Seekers. Between Liminality and Belonging. (Bristol: Policy Press, 2011);
Christina Boswell, Spreading the Costs of Asylum Seekers: A Critical Assessment of Dispersal Policies in Germany and the UK. (London: Anglo-German Foundation, 2001).
Randy Lippert and Sean Rehaag, Sanctuary Practices in International Perspectives: Migration, Citizenship and Social Movements. (August 14, 2014).
See: Patricia Hynes, The Dispersal and Social Exclusion of Asylum Seekers. Between Liminality and Belonging. (Bristol: Policy Press, 2011);
Christina Boswell, Spreading the Costs of Asylum Seekers: A Critical Assessment of Dispersal Policies in Germany and the UK. (London: Anglo-German Foundation, 2001).
Raymond Geuss, ‘Nietzsche and Genealogy,’ in Nietzsche, ed. John Richardson and Brian Leiter. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 322–340. Also see Appendix 1 for a more lengthy discussion about how this approach is deployed.
I borrow this framing from Raymond Geuss where he discusses the genealogical method as a process of following lines that have been displaced. Raymond Geuss, ‘Nietzsche and Genealogy,’ in Nietzsche, ed. John Richardson and Brian Leiter. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 322–340.
CJ Cox, The Sanctuaries and Sanctuary Seekers of Mediaeval England. (London: George Allen & Sons, 1911).
Sylvie Da Lomba’s ‘Legal status and refugee integration: a UK perspective,’ Journal of Refuge Studies 23, no. 4 (2010), 415–436.
Also see: Margaret S. Malloch and Elizabeth Stanley, “The detention of asylum seekers in the UK: representing risk, managing the dangerous,” in Punishment & Society 7, no. 1 (2005), 53–71;
Alice Bloch and Liza Schuster At the Extremes of Exclusion: deportation, detention and dispersal,’ in Ethnic and Racial Studies 28, no. 3 (2005), 491–512.
Where time is explored in relation to asylum regimes it is often brought within a remit of intensity, and speed. It has been suggested that ‘beyond the question of rights, the question of speed is central,’ Didier Bigo and Elspeth Guild, Controlling Frontiers: Free Movement into and within Europe. (London: Ashgate, 2005), 9. Using Paul Virgilios work on ‘politics of speed’ Bigo contends that today: ‘The reign of speed and acceleration is linked with technologies, with remote control policies, with virtualization and anticipation through morphing of the future of the persons who are on the move. And against speed, slowness never wins… time to avoid passion and the time to think is time considered lost or wasted (9). So too, the way in which a person’s ‘case’ is streamlined in such a way that their whole story is cut short, putting them on the ‘fast track’ to exclusion, has gained a lot of attention. The emphasis on processing speed can be read as an attempt to ‘regain control over the movements and narratives of displaced peoples that have grown beyond the state’s control.’ Vital terms used to analyze this context are: ‘decreased period, streamlined, instantaneous.’ See: Saulo Cwerner, ‘Work faster, faster and faster: the time politics of asylum in the UK’ in Time & Society 13, no. 1 (2004), 71–88. Whilst speed is an important component it seems vital to call into question the seemingly more elongated processes. What a ‘reign of speed’ fails to fully unravel is the way in which a seemingly passive temporality, of holding certain figures in abeyance, is also functioning. What about other technologies that force one into a position of waiting in a liminal zone? This acceleration that Cwerner speaks of is particularly troubling when it is entangled with technologies of extending time;
for instance, long delays that force people to hurry up and wait. Although a politics of speed tends to reign, there is an acknowledgment that asylum seekers often experience lives in a state of ‘indefinite temporariness.’ See: Enrica Rigo, Citizens despite borders: challenges to the territorial order of Europe, in The Contested Politics of Mobility: Borderzones and Irregularity, ed. Vicki Squire. (New York: Routledge, 2011), 199–215. It remains unclear whether speedy technologies are the most effective in understanding how such liminality are being produced and normalized. This book seeks to contribute to this literature by exploring how an indefinite waiting state is being produced and normalized through the unlikely welcoming discourse of sanctuary. This book has offered an analysis on how the normalization of an enduring waiting time—where an intense and imminent agenda is seemingly absent—is functioning. The analysis of the City of Sanctuary put forth in this book reveals that time requires deeper thought precisely where it appears in its passive, pastoral and even empowering form;
See: Nick Gill, ‘Presentational State Power: Temporal and Spatial Influences over Asylum Sector Decision Makers,’ Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 34, no. 2 (2009), 215–233;
Deirdre Conlon, ‘Gender, Place & Culture,’ A Journal of Feminist Geography 18, no. 3, (2011), 353–360.
Charity has been posed as a natural last resort solution to many of the problems facing refugees and asylum seekers in the UK today. Charity work has been framed as a tenable solution to many of the forms of exclusion that refugees and asylum seekers face, suggesting that ‘direct action’ in the form of charity work is an essential and influential means for promoting hospitality and transforming more inclusive policy. What is interesting is that charity is often framed not simply as a passive process, but a form of self-help. Christina Boswell, Ethics of Refugee Policy. (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2005), 151–152. Troublingly, here, the ways in which this supposedly temporary type of support is extended indefinitely (thereby extending temporariness as a protracted ways of being) is under-explored.
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1978–1979. This sequence of lectures pivots around a discussion of governmentality that spawned a whole school of governmentality studies.’
Barbara Cruikshank, The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999);
Nikolas Rose, “The death of the social? Re-figuring the territory of government,” Economy and Society 25, no. 3 (1996), 327–356.
Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 1978–1979.
Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning & the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf. (London: Routledge, 1994). A spectral reading is never of one realm, one mode entirely;
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© 2016 Jennifer J. Bagelman
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Bagelman, J.J. (2016). Introduction. In: Sanctuary City: A Suspended State. Mobility & Politics. Palgrave Pivot, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137480385_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137480385_1
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