Sanctuary Practices, Rationalities, and Sovereignties

Abstract

All human behavior is scheduled and programmed through rationality. There is a logic of institutions and in behavior and in political relations. --Michel Foucault These people are not cases to us. They are human beings with names and faces. --Southern Ontario Sanctuary Coalition Placing on display a masked and hooded Guatemalan migrant threatened with immediate deportation by immigration officials at a televised press conference in January 1984, an ecumenical group of church officials pronounced Saint Andrew's United Church on the outskirts of Montreal to be a public sanctuary. Referred to only as Raphael, the migrant, positioned next to church officials and who had been living concealed in the church building for weeks, remained silent during the entire spectacle. Within hours, the minister of immigration had publicly announced that all deportations to Guatemala would be temporarily halted and that sanctuary providers would be spared prosecution. This unprecedented act of granting sanctuary to this migrant, the first of its kind in Canada, was exceptional, its spectacular character programmed and rational. At least two issues have endured in the innovative literature inspired by Michel Foucault's later writings and lectures. One is how liberal and nonliberal governmental rationalities of rule relate to one another. If liberalism as a governmental rationality is not to be understood as totalizing or systematizing (1) and having surpassed or incorporated all other logics, then nonliberal rationalities may be present in particular instances of governing society today. Questions about their current character and relevance and how they relate to dominant liberal rationalities therefore warrant more attention. A second but related issue concerns sovereign power and its relationship with governmentality. It has been increasingly recognized in the governmentality literature that sovereign power cannot be easily dismissed as archaic or as altogether superseded by governmentality. (2) However, sovereign power has been narrowly conceived, assumed to be essentially coercive and to take the form of symbolic punishment, violence, or exclusion. (3) This coercive form of power also tends to be foreseen to flow from a single space and source, the (nation-)state. (4) Sanctuary practices in Canada, along with immigration practices that they at once parallel and challenge, promise to shed some light on these two issues. Sanctuary entails churches and communities harboring in a physical shelter individual migrants or migrant families faced with imminent arrest and deportation by immigration authorities and actively seeking to display the existence of their protection efforts. (5) This article draws from detailed research pertaining to twenty-eight sanctuary incidents that occurred in Canada from 1984 to 2002. (6) The vast majority of the approximately 239 migrants who received sanctuary in these incidents were refugee claimants, or immediate family thereof, who had attempted, but failed to gain, formal legal status through official means. (7) This article seeks to clarify via empirical research how the various powers--liberal, nonliberal, and sovereign--can be distinguished, the relations among them better understood. (8) I first briefly discuss what sanctuary practices reveal about a nonliberal pastoral rationality and how this specific logic relates to a dominant neoliberalism. Following Foucault's account of sovereign power, I then show how sanctuary is an instance of sovereign power. Sanctuary suggests that sovereign power is not restricted to the (nation-)state, that it can flow from other spaces and sources, and that it is not always coercive in nature. This analysis has several implications for understanding governing society today, the most basic of which is to suggest the need to allow for a plurality of sovereignties and rationalities in specific contexts. …