Hostile Environments: Refugees, Asylum Seekers and the Politics of Loneliness

Abstract

Claims to a historic tradition of 'sanctuary' in the United Kingdom are contested by the long, entangled roots of the hostile environment, long before its official announcement as policy by the 2012 Coalition government. What happens if we frame this hostility or inhospitability as the structural enforcement of loneliness? Loneliness is the consequence of racism and xenophobia. It is a weapon used by the state, to construct borders, to separate families, to imprison, to detain, to deport, to take away belonging. Loneliness can be a lack of recognition, of being without status or documents, of indefiniteness, of lives lived precariously or in poverty. This essay takes the experiences of refugee loneliness in the second half of the twentieth century as enforced through the policy of dispersal to examine how isolation has been articulated and how its impact has been countered.