Impoverishment and Asylum by Lucy Mayblin

Author:Lucy Mayblin [Mayblin, Lucy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Sociology
ISBN: 9781000767346
Google: yXzADwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2019-11-27T04:59:28+00:00

The third sector, asylum policy, and undesirable public goods

While the continuation of policies which produce slow violence are popular and made possible by colonial logics of human hierarchy, of desirability and mourn-ability, this response is not monolithic across the general public. Third sector organisations, charities, community groups, social movements, and faith-based organisations are all central in resisting the hegemonic construal of people seeking asylum as undesirable, illegitimate, and excludable. While this is a large and diverse grouping of actors and organisations, most undertake two broad courses of action: providing humanitarian relief to the suffering created by the state, and challenging the state to change the regime which produces this suffering. In this sense, civil society may offer internal constraints which prevent liberal states from pursuing a wholly restrictive agenda (Joppke, 1998). And yet the logics behind these two responses -humanitarian relief and directly challenging the regime- are very different. The former constitutes part of the system while the latter seeks to upend the system.

This chapter focuses on humanitarian relief and I therefore conceptualise RTSOs working in the UK as humanitarian actors. Humanitarianism is more often associated with interventions in Third World contexts, such as large-scale refugee crises, by international charities based in Western countries. However, some of the same international organisations, most notably the Red Cross, offer humanitarian relief to people seeking asylum in the UK, and the national context is similar to ‘Third World’ contexts in that there are not only international organisations but also a plethora of nationally and locally based organisations responding to a perceived crisis of need. Since the Red Cross is the only international actor working in this space in the UK, a grass-roots humanitarian praxis (McGee and Pelham, 2018) has also emerged to fill the gaps in state support. This grass-roots humanitarian praxis is made up of locally based organisations that have emerged in direct response to increasing local need for clothing, food, toiletries, and other essential items, most often (as will be shown) in cities and towns where asylum applicants are housed.

Humanitarian relief (providing food, clothing, shelter, advice) has the potential to ‘disturb hostile views and systems’ (Snyder, 2011:570). Through mounting a civil society response we may therefore see the fostering a politics of solidarity and ‘rightful presence’ which disrupts the othering which is produced by the asylum system (Squire, 2011; Squire and Darling, 2013). Snyder (2011) articulates this role (in relation to faith-based organisations specifically) in terms of settling and unsettling. Such organisations, she argues, both help people seeking asylum and those recognised as refugees to settle in place, and unsettle dominant construals of them as unwelcome and undeserving. This is an interesting function of the dispersed humanitarianism that is happening in this space in the UK, in contrast to the spatially concentrated and professionalised support offered to those in ‘crisis zones’ and refugee camps in the ‘Third World’.

A good example is the ‘Cities of Sanctuary’ movement, which seeks to build a culture of welcome rooted in particular locales which can both

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