Introduction: sanctuary across countries, institutions, and disciplines

Beginning in the late 1970s, sanctuary practices underwent a revival. Immigrants living without legal status and their supporters, first in the United Kingdom, and then in the United States, Canada, and elsewhere in Europe, have resorted to sanctuary practices to avoid and resist arrest and deportation by state authorities. Sanctuary appeared amidst a dramatic rise in the number of asylumseekers arriving in Western countries and a simultaneous escalation in national and international efforts to discourage and control their arrival and presence through myriad means, including arrest and deportation. This volume explores sanctuary in its multiple iterations and examines theconceptual and theoretical issues into which they provide insight in new national and institutional contexts. Assembled are 17 chapters written by scholars from eight countries. Each chapter either explores key issues that sanctuary practices raise or details the development and trajectory of a particular sanctuary movement. Most do both. In so doing, this volume showcases the multi-disciplinary character of sanctuary scholarship, with chapters authored by scholars writing from the disciplines of anthropology, geography, political science, sociology, law, theology, and English. Among these scholars are also several sanctuary movement participants. The chapters are geographically diverse, exploring sanctuary in the US, Canada, the UK, Germany, Finland, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, France, Iraq and Afghanistan. The volume is organized as follows. This Introduction highlights key themesand overviews the chapters. The volume is then divided into four Parts: Part I on historical, theological and theoretical perspectives on sanctuary that reveal its justifications and rationales; Part II on the US context, including the 1980s US Sanctuary Movement’s effects and the recent inter-faith New Sanctuary Movement (NSM); Part III, an international section, primarily focused on traditional faith-based sanctuary practices and movements in Europe and Canada; and Part IV on emergent forms of sanctuary, which also has an international flavour in covering developments in the US, Canada, and the UK, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan. There is inevitably some overlap of purpose among the four Parts, but Part I is broadly focused on ways of seeing and justifying sanctuary; Parts IIand III expose details of neglected contemporary sanctuary movements and practices internationally; and, finally, Part IV encompasses chapters that explore the broadening of sanctuary beyond Christian churches and its emergence in other institutional realms such as municipal governments and in international/ military relations. In the English-speaking world, most people associate contemporary sanctuarypractices with a faith-based social movement commencing in the early 1980s in the US. This movement spawned an extensive multi-disciplinary body of scholarship, ranging from ethnographies informed by social movement theory, to sociological studies of so-called ‘deviant behaviour’, to consideration of legal questions surrounding constitutional freedom-of-religion claims, especially in the wake of US state authorities charging and convicting several sanctuary activists. However, by the early 1990s, this self-defined social movement had all but expired in the US. The existing scholarship on sanctuary, drawing mostly on this US experience,has exposed sanctuary as a set of practices, including spatial practices, as a fertile site to unearth and examine theoretical and conceptual questions from across several disciplines. Scholars have theorized sanctuary in relation not only to migration and citizenship processes but also gender, race, church-state relations, social movements, civil disobedience, freedom of religion, and political identity. Activists and scholars have wrestled with several vital questions about contemporary sanctuary practices. Do these practices constitute a social movement or a string of unrelated events that merely share similar tactics? Are these practices faith-based or an assemblage of disparate elements, some secular, some sacred? How do these practices relate to law; are they ‘illegal’ as state agents often argue or are they a means to actuate higher forms of law, including international law? The collection’s aim is to surpass isolated accounts and case studies of sanc-tuary practices and movements in one country, from one perspective, and one historical period that characterize sanctuary scholarship to date. Rarely noted in existing scholarship is that sanctuary practices have had a presence outside the US, continue to persist, and have undergone a recent US resurgence. Thus, neglected are sanctuary activities outside the US before (as in the UK), and after the early 1980s (as in Canada, Germany, France and the Nordic countries). That said, the US remains a key site of sanctuary, especially with the rise of the NSM, which culminated in a national sanctuary meeting in New York City in 2009 and which helped inspire in continental Europe an international conference on sanctuary in Germany in 2010. Sanctuary, therefore, would seem to be garnering popular and scholarly attention in the US once again. Two chapters in this collection focus exclusively on the NSM and its significant conceptual and theoretical implications. Moreover, the US has been the source or location of several of sanctuary’s other forms that are explored in Part IV. This volume also seeks to reveal sanctuary as a more international, institu-tionally-flexible, and perhaps above all, theoretically-rich set of practices. Thecollection’s multi-disciplinary and international character raises new questions about sanctuary movements and practices. Among the principal issues that require such consideration and debate include: What is the critical potential of sanctuary practices? Are these acts of consequence beyond the relatively small spaces and the few lives positioned at their centre? Are they the symbolic tip of an iceberg of resistant acts waiting to surface if conditions present themselves? Alternatively, are they merely another appendage of the state systems of inclusion and exclusion involving refugee determination and immigrant selection, merely a temporary corrective for flaws in these systems, despite their accompanying rhetoric of resistance and sovereignty? Are these practices representative of asymmetrical power relations at their core? At the centre of contemporary sanctuary activities has been – almost exclusively –immigrants (often asylum-seekers) living without legal status in Western countries. All but two of the 17 chapters in this volume focus on sanctuary in relation to migration and to a lesser extent citizenship processes or on the role of immigrants without legal status in sanctuary practices. These two chapters, the first and last in this volume, situate sanctuary in an even broader perspective. They reveal that sanctuary’s terrain in the past was not always migration and citizenship and that it may not be so in the future. Sanctuary was once about protecting persons alleged to have committed criminal acts, rather than immigrants facing expulsion, as Karl Shoemaker’s Chapter 1 on medieval sanctuary documents. Nor is it clear this link will continue in the future, because sanctuary has quickly begun acquiring new forms and meanings during its revival in the 1980s and during the post-9/11 context since. As Michael Innes shows in Chapter 17, ‘sanctuary’ has been increasingly invoked in military and/or international relations discourse to refer to ‘terrorist and militant’ havens and spaces of terrorism in Iraq and Afghanistan. Other themes that emerge in the volume are equally significant. These con-cern visibility, asymmetry, agency, sovereignty, legality, mutability and transformative potential. Reflected in the earliest scholarly accounts of contemporary sanctuary practices, the division between visibility and non-visibility is seen in the analytical distinction between sanctuary as ‘exposure’ and sanctuary as ‘concealment’. The former – exposure – is a strategy to provide protection to immigrants in a church or religious building and to gain the attention of mass media, the public and state authorities. The latter – concealment – is the antithesis of this effort whereby sanctuary provision is purposely concealed from state authorities. Whether sanctuary practices are invisible or visible has much to do with the shifting rationales and purposes of sanctuary practices that are welldocumented in this volume. In Hector Perla and Susan Bibler Coutin’s Chapter 5, for example, the issue manifests in relation to questions of whether Central American activists needed to remain quiet and become invisible to foster North Americans’ involvement in the 1980s sanctuary movement. In other words, invisibility was maintained to hide practices, not only from US authorities, but also from other movement activists or would-be participants.

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