The “Minor” Politics of Rightful Presence: Justice and Relationality inCity of Sanctuary

Abstract

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

Migration and diversity in a post-socialist context: Creating integrative encounters in Poland

“…The distinction between 'host' and 'guest' does not hold in the localised activities of the League (cf. Squire and Darling's, 2013 observation of the UK City of Sanctuary movement). Indeed, some players had partial Polish heritage or were married to Polish citizens.…”

Forced migration and the city

“…For urban refugees and asylum seekers the question becomes one of how presence may be situated as a claim to rightfulness (Squire and Darling, 2013). Whilst the city provides the context in which claims are made possible, work on urban refugees might explore those claims that are centred on a framing of justice rather than one of hospitality within the city.…”

“…Secondly, claiming presence has the capacity to articulate a 'political subjectivity and its expression to rights' (Isin, 2012: 109) that is delinked from assumptions of citizenship, and that is 'transversal' in assuming rights not through the fixity of residence, but through presence as both a statement of social fact and a transversal connection. Presence in the city is always the culmination of multiple flows and linkages, and as such it poses questions over the frames of justice and injustice that have led individuals to the city (Squire and Darling, 2013).…”

Struggles over human rights in local government – the case of access to education for undocumented youth in Malmö, Sweden

“…9, also see Bhabha 2009), and other scholars working with her, we understand human rights as a political negotiation, setting out from the position of rights-holders themselves (Ingram 2008;Squire and Darling 2013). The invention of human rights is a creative, democratic process, and as James Ingram states, challenging 'particular exclusions and inequalities in the name of the open-ended principle of equal freedom, which acquires its particular contours only through this contestation ' (2008: 412).…”