From Community Cohesion to Mobile Solidarities: The City of Sanctuary Network and the Strangers into Citizens Campaign
| DOI | 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00865.x |
| Date | 01 June 2011 |
| Author | Vicki Squire |
| Published date | 01 June 2011 |
| Subject Matter | Article |
P O L I T I C A L S T U D I E S : 2 0 1 1 VO L 5 9 , 2 9 0 – 3 0 7
doi: 10.1111/j.1467-9248.2010.00865.x
From Community Cohesion to Mobile
Solidarities: The City of Sanctuary Network
and the Strangers into Citizens Campaignpost_865290..307
Vicki Squire
Open University
This article draws attention to the limitations of the UK’s integration and cohesion agenda and introduces an
alternative analytical approach that focuses on solidarity, mobility and citizenship over cohesion, integration and
community. Developing such an approach through analysing the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into
Citizens campaign, the article has two interrelated objectives. First, it aims to shed critical light on the assumptions
regarding community that inform the UK’s integration and cohesion agenda, which involves a series of contradictions
that exclude asylum seekers and irregular migrants as subjects of integration and cohesion. Second, it aims to offer
some reflections on how these assumptions are challenged by the City of Sanctuary network and the Strangers into
Citizens campaign, based on the activation of mobile solidarities that cut across established social hierarchies. In so
doing, the article suggests that the UK’s approach to integration and cohesion is flawed because it overlooks
engagements and solidarities in which cultural categories and legal distinctions are extraneous, while at the same time
it privileges the collective engagements of established residents over those whose presence may be more fleeting or less
definite. In order to demonstrate the inadequacies of such an approach, the article shows how minor acts of citizenship
that are mobilised by City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens enact a mobile form of solidarity based on
participation through presence. This, the article argues, potentially serves as the grounds for a critical alternative to an
approach that assumes that intensified movements and diversities induce hostility.
Keywords: community; citizenship; mobility; solidarity; diversity
Deep contradictions are evident in the UK government’s recent policies on immigration
and asylum. On the one hand there has been a strong push to open up migratory routes for
those migrants whose skills are in demand, while on the other hand many migrants whose
skills are in demand are denied the right to work after entering the UK (Harris, 2002). On
the one hand there has been a reaffirmation of the UK’s commitment to providing a safe
haven to those seeking refuge from persecution, while on the other hand those seeking
refuge have increasingly been intercepted before reaching states such as the UK (Gibney,
2004; Sales, 2005). On the one hand there has been an attempt to draw clear lines between
those seeking refuge and those seeking work, while on the other hand there has been a
reactionary conflation of the two (Lewis and Neal, 2005). These contradictions result in
exclusions in the UK’s integration and cohesion policies. Thus, on the one hand there is
evidence of a commitment to integrating new arrivals within cohesive communities, while
on the other hand there is evidence of the exclusion of asylum seekers and irregular
migrants from the remit of integration and cohesion (Squire, 2005).
It is not the intention of this article to examine the consequences of such contradictions
and exclusions, which have already been well documented by analysts of asylum and
© 2010 The Author. Political Studies © 2010 Political Studies Association
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migration (e.g. Morris, 2002; Sales, 2002; 2007; Squire, 2009a). Rather, the article has two
interrelated aims. First, it aims to shed critical light on some of the assumptions about
community that inform the UK’s integration and cohesion agenda, which are at least in
part constitutive of the contradictions and exclusions outlined above. Second, it aims to
offer some reflections on how these assumptions are challenged by movements that
mobilise around issues of refugee and migrant justice: the City of Sanctuary network and
the Strangers into Citizens campaign, respectively. The article undertakes this dual task by
exploring the conception of community that informs the current integration and cohe-
sion agenda, and by drawing attention to alternative renderings of collective engagement
that are evident in City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens. The analysis draws on a
series of in-depth qualitative interviews with a total of twelve organisers and participants
from Sheffield City of Sanctuary and London Citizens, which were carried out in the
spring/summer of 2009. It also draws upon a documentary analysis of material written
by organisers, as well as upon observations of meetings with participants from each of the
mobilisations in question.1
Two key assumptions about community are reflected in the contradictions and exclusions
of the UK’s integration and cohesion agenda. First, community is understood politically in
terms of legal membership. In relation to integration and cohesion, this notion of political
community is linked to the assumption that those whose status is temporary, ambiguous
or undecided do not count as subjects of integration or cohesion. Such a conception
is evident, for example, in the fact that integration policy is officially orientated toward
refugees and immigrants rather than toward migrants or asylum seekers (see National
Strategy for Refugee Integration, 2004). Second, community is understood culturally in
terms of ethnic, religious or alternative forms of collective identification. In relation to
integration and cohesion, this notion of the cultural community is reflected in the
assumption that there exist different groups which can be integrated within a cohesive yet
differentiated whole. This is evident, for example, in the definition of cohesion as a process
that is designed ‘to ensure that different groups get on well’ (Commission on Integration
and Cohesion, 2007, p. 9). Cohesion is conceived here as complementary to integration,
which is defined as a process ‘that ensures new residents and existing residents get on
together’ (Commission on Integration and Cohesion, 2007, p. 9).
Indeed, these two notions of community are evident if we consider how asylum seekers are
disqualified, yet also partially included, as subjects of integration or cohesion. While those
with refugee status have been the main subjects of integration policies over recent years,
asylum seekers have not been explicitly addressed as such. Reflecting the assumption that
integration and cohesion only apply to subjects who are legal members of the political
community, asylum seekers’ undecided or ambivalent status would seem to disqualify them
from integration or cohesion. Nevertheless, asylum seekers have not been completely
excluded, but rather have been indirectly addressed at the local level in terms of their
affiliation with specific refugee community organisations (see Zetter and Pearl, 2000).
Cultural as well as legal understandings of community and membership thus remain
important to the contemporary integration and cohesion agenda, with asylum seekers
formally disqualified from, yet informally included within, such an approach.
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V I C K I S Q U I R E
While there remains work to be done in exploring the complexities of and tensions
between these different notions of community as they are played out in the UK’s integra-
tion and cohesion agenda, this article offers a different focus in showing how the emphasis
on community in its legal or cultural form invokes a problematic conception of integration
or cohesion. Specifically, the article suggests that the UK’s approach to integration and
cohesion is flawed because it overlooks enactments of solidarity in which cultural categories
and legal distinctions disappear or are relatively unimportant. This is problematic because
it leads to a privileging of the collective engagements of citizens or ‘established’ residents
over those whose presence may be more fleeting or less definite. Demonstrating the
inadequacies of such an approach with reference to the City of Sanctuary network and the
Strangers into Citizens campaign, the article argues that the mobilisations in question activate
a dynamic or mobile form of solidarity through which cultural affiliation and legal status
are rendered insignificant. In order to develop this argument the article introduces the
concept of ‘mobile solidarities’, which refers to the creation of collective political subjects
through mobilisations that promote the physical movements of people as well as the
multiple diversities that such movements bring about (social and economic as well as
cultural and legal). The article suggests that City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens need
to be considered in light of collective engagements that emerge in the context of intensified
movements and diversities, and that this requires a shift of focus away from cohesion,
integration and community and toward solidarity, mobility and citizenship. Specifically,
it suggests that the importance of City of Sanctuary and Strangers into Citizens lies in their
ability to mobilise dynamic collective engagements through which social hierarchies are
disrupted or overturned. Such engagements might be conceptualised as...
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