Who provides the conditions for human life? Sanctuary movements in Sweden as both contesting and working with state agencies

Date01 August 2017
AuthorAnna Lundberg,Michael Strange
DOI10.1177/0263395716661343
Published date01 August 2017
Subject MatterSpecial Issue Articles
/tmp/tmp-17r9hFdR9Zq9Vx/input 661343POL0010.1177/0263395716661343PoliticsLundberg and Strange
research-article2016
Special Issue Article
Politics
2017, Vol. 37(3) 347 –362
Who provides the conditions
© The Author(s) 2016
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for human life? Sanctuary
https://doi.org/10.1177/0263395716661343
DOI: 10.1177/0263395716661343
journals.sagepub.com/home/pol
movements in Sweden as
both contesting and working
with state agencies

Anna Lundberg and Michael Strange
Malmö University, Sweden
Abstract
This article analyses sanctuary initiatives intended to change the situation of ‘irregularised
residents’. Through fieldwork, three main activities are identified: assistance for welfare services,
alternatives to inaccessible services, and inventing new ways of organising togetherness in the city.
The role of activists in the initiatives links to discussions within Critical Human Rights literature,
which emphasise the anti-institutionalist origins of rights. Yet, a complex interplay also plays out
through co-current resistance against the state’s migration policing and collaboration with city-
level state agencies. Understanding this complex process is important to improving knowledge of
both the politics of sanctuary and human rights.
Keywords
human rights, irregularised residents, right-ing, sanctuary, Sweden
Received: 12th November 2015; Revised version received: 8th April 2016; Accepted: 9th June 2016
Introduction
Utilising the example of activist movements in Sweden, this article traces the complex
negotiations over the politics evident in contemporary forms of sanctuary. Acts of provid-
ing sanctuary – understood here as creating a place of refuge, as well as initiatives for
such shelters and practices to come about, and more broadly to visualise new ways in
which communities may be organised – have become increasingly common as a response
to states’ efforts to deter trans-border migration. Municipal institutions such as libraries,
state institutions such as universities, and private actors like cultural associations, sports
clubs and others invent practices for ‘safe havens’ for those turned into ‘deportables’ (De
Corresponding author:
Anna Lundberg, Department of Global Political Studies, Faculty of Culture and Society, Malmö University,
205 06 Malmö, Sweden.
Email: Anna.lundberg@mah.se

348
Politics 37(3)
Genova, 2002), that is, migrants formally subject to expulsion from the state. The sanctu-
ary initiatives discussed in this article, more specifically, involve activities with three
main characteristics. First, the activities appear as a form of political resistance in that
they challenge the primacy of the state in regulating conditions for acceptable life on state
territory. This key component of contemporary sanctuary practices is highlighted by
Hilary Cunningham ([2012] 2014) who introduces an understanding of sanctuary prac-
tices as a matter of upholding the law in the face of unlawful state actions, so-called ‘civil
initiatives’, and Grace Yukich’s ([2012] 2014) description of these practices as ‘radical
accompaniment’. Second, the activities are intended to assist persons formally lacking a
residence permit to get access to their rights according to international human rights trea-
ties. Third, the initiatives pose a more radical creation of new ways along which commu-
nities can be organised in the city, going beyond legalistic models of citizenship. Through
both directly providing alternative spheres for human existence while drawing upon
legal-institutionalist articulations of human rights, sanctuary becomes a site of everyday
struggle over human rights, as the article shows. Bridget Anderson’s notion of a ‘com-
munity of value’ (Anderson, 2013) is relevant for our understanding of struggles as a
community building exercise. While the imagined community in terms of nationalism is
associated with the far right, its assumptions structure much of our daily lives and our
politics also in other ways. ‘Us’ is placed in a world of homelands all the way down to
sports pages (Anderson, 2013: 178). The initiatives explored in our study may be under-
stood as an expression of what Anderson describes as a complex and open ‘us’ that has
the possibility of being shaped by shared imagined futures as well as shared imagined
pasts.
The persons categorised as ‘deportables’ under most Swedish circumstances are
referred to as undocumented migrants, undocumented persons or ‘those without papers’
(from sans papier). In this text, we use the terminology ‘irregularised residents’ or ‘irreg-
ularised migrants’ interchangeably as these terms highlight the construction of undocu-
mentedness as well as the long-term excluded residency that comes about when persons
over time are not granted formal authorisation and are thus ‘irregularized’ (e.g. Anderson,
2013: 117f) uses the term ‘illegal’ to highlight the state constructed nature of the category
of illegal immigrant).
Modern sanctuary poses several puzzles as to how we should understand the politics of
human rights today, particularly in relation to irregularised migrants. As will be discussed,
contemporary forms of sanctuary need to be understood not simply as acts of benevolence
but, rather, much more complex processes of political negotiation between multiple actors
that can include moments of resistance against the state as well as periods of collaboration
with state institutions. Studying this negotiation is important for a broader understanding
of both human rights in local contexts and a key issue within contemporary politics.
In developing the perspective that sanctuary can be both a form of resistance against,
and collaboration with, state institutions, the article draws upon in-depth fieldwork and
interviews with those involved in sanctuary initiatives – including activists and municipal
representatives. Sweden is an interesting case for studies on migration given its, at least
until Autumn 2015, image as one of the last safe havens for refugees within the Europe
Union (Andersson, 2012; Crouch, 2015; Emilsson, 2014). In that context, are acts of sanc-
tuary visible in Sweden a complement to its supposed comparatively ‘migrant-friendly’
rules, or is the relationship more antagonistic? In exploring the relationship between acts
of sanctuary and human rights law in the Swedish context, the article brings much-needed
new light on the political character of both sanctuary and human rights. Over the years,

Lundberg and Strange
349
the Swedish state has come to encourage and finance non-state actors that serve to pro-
vide support for migrants with different legal statuses. A recent example is the assistance
expected to be provided by support networks for irregularised children for them to be able
to attend school (Skolverket, 2015). Embedded here are several political and regulatory
tensions that create uncertainty over the rights of irregularised residents – including which
rights are to be protected, how, and by whom. As argued here, tensions become particu-
larly visible in the case of sanctuary initiatives where non-state actors and, as we will
discuss below, also state institutions, offer sanctuary beyond helping to get access to
usual conditional and regulated rights. Currently, as will be discussed further, non-state
actors and state institutions provide sanctuary for irregularised residents despite the
state’s ambition to keep migration numbers down.
The relationship between non-state, informal forms of sanctuary and the state’s func-
tion as a primary provider of rights is complex, and in need of new research if it is to be
better understood. This article is a contribution to discussions about the relationship
between human rights law and sanctuary in the Swedish context, a field hitherto unex-
plored. With very few exceptions (Loga et al., [2012] 2014), previous research has so far
explored sanctuary initiatives in the United Kingdom (Ridgley, 2008), the United States
(Behrman, 2015; Schreiber, 2012) and Canada (Ellis, 2015; also see Solidarity City
Network, 2013), and ignored Swedish cases of sanctuary. This is possibly because Sweden
has been widely perceived as a migrant-friendly state and so not an obvious site for sanc-
tuary practices. However, this is changing fast at the time of writing, as the government
in Stockholm is currently changing its immigration laws to drastically reduce the number
of refugees coming to Sweden to seek protection, to signal to other European Union
(EU) states to take on a larger responsibility than they had previously (see Crouch,
2015), and to asylum seekers that they should not aim for Sweden. However, as the article
shows, sanctuary practices have occurred before in Sweden and studying them provides
much-needed empirical data able to help broaden our understanding on the politics of
sanctuary.
The article is structured as follows. The first section reviews how existing literature
has attempted to operationalise sanctuary as a political act, introducing a typology based
on the extent to which sanctuary movements are acts of political resistance against the
state, as well as the role of the receiver of sanctuary. Providing sanctuary has much in
common with the act of stating and putting human rights into practice, both seeming to
place a rights discourse above the sovereignty of nation-state borders. Yet, as the article
argues, there is a distinction between acts of sanctuary and human rights, where the...

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