Sanctuary Cities and Urban Struggles

This book brings together an interdisciplinary team of scholars to explore how urban social movements, localised practices of rights claiming, and diverse articulations of sanctuary are reshaping the governance of migration.

Sanctuary cities and urban struggles makes the first sustained intervention into exploring how cities are challenging the primacy of the nation-state as the key guarantor of rights and entitlements. In an era when migrant rights are under attack and nationalism is on the rise, the topic of how citizenship, rights, and mobility can be recast at the urban scale is more relevant than ever.

This collection brings together scholars at the cutting edge of political geography, urban geography, citizenship studies, socio-legal studies and refugee studies to explore how urban social movements, localised practices of belonging and rights claiming, and diverse articulations of sanctuary are reshaping the governance of migration. Working from the intimate relations of the body and interpersonal accounts of sanctuary through to strategies for autonomous settlement emerging from Europe’s ‘summer of migration’, this book sets out to challenge the often assumed primacy of the nation-state as the dominant lens through which to understand questions of citizenship and mobility. The book proposes not a singular alternative, but rather a set of interlocking sites and scales of political imagination and practice. It achieves this goal by offering a collection of empirical cases and conceptualisations that move beyond ‘seeing like a state’.

Sanctuary cities and urban struggles will be of interest to geographers, political sociologists, migration scholars, social anthropologists, political scientists, and urbanists, and is highly relevant to diverse audiences, ranging from scholars and advanced undergraduate and graduate students, to urban policy makers and activists.

Sanctuary cities and urban struggles makes the first sustained intervention into exploring how cities are challenging the primacy of the nation-state as the key guarantor of rights and entitlements. It brings together cutting-edge scholars of political geography, urban geography, citizenship studies, socio-legal studies and refugee studies to explore how urban social movements, localised practices of belonging and rights claiming, and diverse articulations of sanctuary are reshaping the governance of migration. By offering a collection of empirical cases and conceptualisations that move beyond 'seeing like a state', Sanctuary cities and urban struggles proposes not a singular alternative but rather a set of interlocking sites and scales of political imagination and practice. In an era when migrant rights are under attack and nationalism is on the rise, the topic of how citizenship, rights and mobility can be recast at the urban scale is more relevant than ever.