Abstract
By juxtaposing religious, legal, and victims'accounts of political violence, this essay identifies and critiques assumptions about agency, the individual, and the state that derive from liberal theory and that underlie U.S. asylum law. In the United States, asylum is available to aliens whose gooernments fail to protect them from persecution on the basis of their race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or social group membership. Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants have challenged this definition of persecution with their two-decade-long struggle for asylum in the United States. During the 1980s, U.S. religious advocates and solidarity workers took legal action on behalf of what they characterized as victims of oppression in Central America. The asylum claims narrated by the beneficiaries of these legal efforts suggest that repessiwe pactices rendered entire populations politically suspect. To prevail in immigration court, however, victims had to prove that they were individually targeted because of being somehow “different” from the population at large. In other words, to obtain asylum, persecution victims had to explain how and why their actions had placed them at risk, even though persecution obscured the reasons that particular individuals were targeted and thus rendered all politically suspect.
Highlights
By juxtaposing religious, legal, and victims' accounts of political violence, this essay identifies and critiques assumptions about agency, the individual, and the state that derive from liberal theory and that underlie U.S asylum law
The author is indebted to the many groups and individuals who participated in this research project; in particular, to the East Bay Sanctuary Covenant, the Tucson Ecumenical Task Force on Central America, the Tucson refugee support group, the Central American Resource Center in Los Angeles, El Rescate, the Association of Salvadorans of Los Angeles, the Coalici6n Centroamericana, and the many individuals who agreed to be interviewed by the author
Do the contradictions within libera theory compromise systems that are designed to protect refugees? Or do liberal ideals of equality and human rights guarantee a measure of safety for the politically vulnerable? To address these questions, I analyze the notions of political subjectivity that have informed Salvadoran immigrants' twodecade-long effort to obtain political asylum or another form of legal status in the United States
Summary
Legal, and victims' accounts of political violence, this essay identifies and critiques assumptions about agency, the individual, and the state that derive from liberal theory and that underlie U.S asylum law. Susan Bibler Coutin is assistant professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at California State University, Los Angeles She is grateful to Susan Gooding for organizing the session for which this paper was first written; to Frank Reynolds for his interest in the manuscript; to Carol Greenhouse, Bill Maurer, Eve Darian-Smith, and Sally Merry for their comments on the manuscript; to Debbie Smith and Dan Kesselbrenner for providing material about the ABC lawsuit; and to Robert Foss for clarifying particular points of law. Political asylum and international refugee law are grounded in liberal notions of agency (as the means of realizing individual capacities), the individual (as someone who has the right to realize these capacities), and the state (as the guarantor of citizens' rights). I argue that this struggle reveals both the limitation of the political subject that is imagined within refugee law and (somewhat paradoxically) the centrality of asylum law to Central Americans' efforts to obtain U.S residency
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