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This paper explores the ways in which practices of asylum governance serve to depoliticise those seeking asylum in the UK. In critiquing claims over the "post-political" nature of contemporary governance, the paper proposes a focus upon situated practices of depoliticisation which displace those seeking asylum through the production of specific sites of accommodation and specific discourses of risk, security and moralised concern. The paper questions the tendency within "post-political" thought to strip the potential of modes of informal citizenship through arguing that minor acts of resistance are ineffectual and illusory. In response, the paper explores irregular migrant's "acts of citizenship", and suggests that such prosaic acts can be powerful forms of political interruption through which new ways of seeing asylum are constructed. The paper concludes by suggesting that an incremental politics orientated around such acts of interruption is essential to challenge the material, affective and discursive closures of asylum domopolitics.

In June 2007, the city of Sheffield officially declared itself to be the UK’s first ‘City of Sanctuary’, a gesture that sought to instil a spirit of ‘welcome and hospitality towards asylum seekers and refugees’. Drawing on a series of interviews and ethnographic work, this paper critically examines this gesture by considering how City of Sanctuary sought to enact a relational account of place through which the responsibilities of Sheffield towards both proximate and distant strangers were highlighted. The paper argues that while the City of Sanctuary movement integrates both relational and territorial political practices, it also actively pursues a relational imaginary through presenting the city as a space of political connections and responsibilities. This is achieved through a twin focus upon the role asylum seekers and refugees play in constituting the city and the role that Sheffield might come to play in national discussions of asylum. Following this discussion, the paper looks to the implications of City of Sanctuary’s work for a relational account of spatial politics, arguing that a dual orientation of spatial responsibilities ‘within’ and ‘beyond’ place may be more easily articulated in reference to some networks and flows than others. The experiences of City of Sanctuary therefore suggest that relational accounts must present a space of negotiation between territorial practices, political networks, spatial responsibilities and geographical imaginations. The development of City of Sanctuary into a national network of towns and cities promoting hospitality indicates the importance of such negotiations for developing a culture of refuge across British cities.

This paper critically examines the political geography of asylum accommodation in the UK, arguing that in the regulation of housing and support services we witness the depoliticisation of asylum. In 2010, the UK Home Office announced that it would be passing contracts to provide accommodation and reception services for asylum seekers to a series of private providers, meaning the end of local authority control over asylum housing. This paper explores the impact of this shift and argues that the result is the production of an asylum market, in which neoliberal norms of market competition, economic efficiency and dispersed responsibility are central. In drawing on interviews with local authorities, politicians and asylum support services in four cities, the paper argues that the privatisation of accommodation has seen the emergence of new assemblages of authority, policy and governance. When combined with a market-oriented transfer of responsibilities, depoliticisation acts to constrain the possibilities of political debate and to predetermine the contours of those policy discussions that do take place. In making this case, the paper challenges the closures of work on post-politics, and argues for an exploration of the situated modalities of practice through which forms of depoliticisation interact with, and are constituted by, processes of neoliberalisation. In this context, the framing of asylum seekers as a 'burden' emerges as a discursive and symbolic achievement of the neoliberal politics of asylum accommodation. Framing asylum seekers as a burden represents both a move to position asylum as a specific and managerial issue, and at the same time reiterates an economic account of asylum as a question of resource allocation, cost and productivity.Key words UK; asylum; neoliberalisation; depoliticisation; post-politics; interviews Geography, School of Environment, Education and Development, University of Manchester, Manchester, M13 9PL Email: jonathan.darling@manchester.ac.uk Revised manuscript received 6 January 2016 one of the reasons we have that model is that the providers we use are experienced in operating in the asylum-seeking market.

This article examines how historical and geographical relations of injustice are "made present" through the activities of the City of Sanctuary network in Sheffield, the UK. In so doing, it exposes the limitations of conceptualizing and enacting sanctuary through the frame of hospitality, and proposes an analytics of "rightful presence" as an alternative frame with which to address contemporary sanctuary practices. In contrast to a body of scholarship and activism that has focused on hospitality as extending the bounds of citizenship to "include" those seeking refuge, we consider how the "minor" politics of City of Sanctuary potentially trouble the assumptions on which such claims to inclusion rest. Our emphasis on the "minor" politics of "making present" injustices is important in bringing to bear an account of justice that is grounded in concrete political struggles, in contrast to the more abstract notion of a justice "to come," associated with some accounts of hospitality. To explore sanctuary practices through a relational account of justice brings to bear a politically attuned account of rightful presence, which potentially challenges pastoral relations of guest-host and the statist framing of sanctuary with which relations of hospitality are intimately bound. This is important, we conclude, in countering the assumption that including the excluded solves the "problem," or relieves the "crisis," of asylum.It does not seem to be an exaggeration to say that we are currently witnessing a "crisis" of asylum across what might be called the global "North," in which established mechanisms of providing refugee protection are under question. Concerns regarding the impact of increased applications on asylum systems, alongside concerns regarding the impact of increased arrivals along land and sea 1