No abstract

Refugees have an increasing global significance, as their numbers continue to grow and the nature of displacement continues to evolve. Different international, state, and local laws and policies play a part in refugee crises. On the one hand, then, it is important to theorize the role of the law in shaping different formations of displacement; on the other, it is also crucial to address how the people involved in these crises (government officials, street-level bureaucrats, forced migrants, and receiving populations) engage with the law. We highlight and develop three areas of sociolegal inquiry that can push forward the study of the law and politics of refuge: ( a) the uneven geography shaping the global humanitarian machine; ( b) the local contexts within which such a machine operates, interacting with different actors’ conceptualizations of justice; and ( c) the distinct dilemmas that the urban environment poses to both refugees and humanitarians. Advancing these areas of sociolegal inquiry requires enriching established theoretical sources in refugee studies with both neglected ones, such as postcolonial theory and Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of forced displacement, and newer ones, such as Didier Fassin's anthropology of morality and pragmatic sociology of ordinary judgments of fairness.

In this article, we argue that migrants' socio-legal experiences in the places where they settle are formed in interaction with how local residents morally reason about the law. Specifically, based on nine months of fieldwork in an impoverished Italian town, we argue that aligning with how local residents approach the law, including when they justify disobeying it, matters a great deal for migrants' lives. Focusing on the workings of a reception center for asylum seekers, we first show how local residents regularly support various violations of the law by referring to alternative-and in their view higher-principles of justice circulating in the town. Migrants find themselves caught up in these local moral tensions, at times even becoming involved in illegal practices unbeknownst to them. We then show how migrants' reactions to the marginality of the law in the town affect their access to local support. Those who align with local nonlegal moral norms obtain access to opportunities, while those who in similar situations invoke the primacy of legality tend to experience ostracization. By investigating the dynamic role of local moralities in situated interaction, this article contributes to both the sociology of morality and the sociology of migration. It shows how moral decision-making processes can and should be studied in their collective dimension, beyond individual-level experiments. Further, with its focus on processes of moral (mis)alignment, it allows us to grasp how place matters for migrants' lives beyond overly general notions of 'hostile' versus 'hospitable' localities.

While Palestine is often approached either as a site of ‘resistance’ or of recent neoliberal de-politicization, the case of young university students defeats dichotomous categorizations and points to the more complex and layered nature of political subjectivities. Drawing on unique ethnographic fieldwork as a student at Najah University in Nablus, this article addresses students’ political subjectivities against the backdrop of three macrochanges in Palestinian recent history: the professionalization of politics, the tightening of internal repression, and the neoliberal economic turn. Overall, the study argues that, while Najah undergraduates maintain a strong nationalist discourse, they have come to conceptualize ‘politics’ as negative, at once ineffective and dangerous. Caught up in a web of conflicting social expectations, the pessimism vis-à-vis the political field leads them to abandon traditional sites of participation and to adopt a cynical yet ultimately political approach to consumption in an attempt to ‘change air’ and ‘just live’.

Si le discours de gauche tend à moins porter dans les quartiers populaires, c’est qu’il engage souvent un registre de la victimisation, qui se révèle peu mobilisateur, voire contre-productif. À travers le témoignage de Fouad, sous-officier de l’Armée qui a grandi dans un HLM de Béziers, Noemi Casati montre que la politisation dans les quartiers populaires repose sur une conscience vive des difficultés qui s’y rencontrent mais qui ne se manifeste pas publiquement à travers un discours misérabiliste.