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...Ontario Sanctuary Coalition
Placing display 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 "governmentality" 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in the governmentality literature that sovereign power cannot be easily dismissed as archaic or as altogether superseded by governmentality.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.
Sanctuary as Pastoral Power
Foucault writes of pastoral power as a "less celebrated" rationality that reveals itself, following an appearance in Hebrew literature, in Christian practices of the Middle Ages. (9) Pastoral power, according to Foucault, is first and foremost about the "care for the life of individuals" and a "constant kindness." It so happens that providing care and extending kindness on a continuing, often-individualized basis, is the raison d'etre of sanctuary. Pastoralism's presence is not restricted to sanctuary, extending as it does to target the marginalized in myriad contexts. Yet it is in sanctuary practice that a pastoral rationality appears in near-exemplary form. While it can be given only cursory attention here, sanctuary's theoretical relevance is partially as fertile ground for interrogating the character of this pastoral mode, its scope, agents, knowledges, and objects.
Two aspects of pastoral power consistent with sanctuary practice are suggested in Foucault's statement about the welfare state being "one of the extremely numerous reappearances of the tricky adjustment between political power wielded over legal subjects and pastoral power wielded over live individuals." (10) As pastoral governance (11) constituted welfare states, this rationality is not a leftover of the distant past when Christian churches wielded considerably more power than they do today. Nor is it continuous with Christian church governance. Thus, Foucault elsewhere notes,
you will say; the pastorate has, if not disappeared, at least lost the main part of its efficiency. This is true, but I think we should distinguish between two aspects of pastoral power--between ecclesiastical institutionalization, which has ceased or at least lost its vitality since the eighteenth century, and its function, which has spread and multiplied outside the ecclesiastical institution. (12)
The notion that pastoral power is not limited to church governance of the distant past is also consistent with subsequent elaborations of this form of power (13) and the few empirical studies (14) that mention its presence. So it is with sanctuary.
Though having their geographical center in church territory, the majority of the twenty-eight sanctuary incidents became as much community as church or faith-based. In instances where sanctuary lasted several months, such as in Calgary, several cities in New Brunswick, Vancouver, and Kingston, in excess of two hundred people lent support in crucial ways. Some of these supporters were drawn from the clergy or the specific congregation or parish concerned, but there were also many individuals from the broader community who were neither necessarily of any professed faith nor of any previous relationship with the local church or the migrant(s) protected within it. A provider noted, for example, that "we had church and labour and community people who had something to do with the church and a lot not to do with the church all working together around the table to keep Maria in the country." (15)
Furthermore, there is only minimal evidence that the community discourse instantiated in sanctuary texts was distinctively Christian in character. Rather, this was at least as much a secular community, evinced by the more or less welcome presence of representatives of labor, student, women, human-rights, and ethnocultural groups and organizations with no religious affiliation, the exact configuration of which varied across incidents. In some incidents of longer duration, ad hoc groups, such as the Friends of the Chileans, the Friends of Mauricio, and the Maria Committee, comprising a few members from the local parish or congregation and the remainder from the broader (secular) community, formed to organize practices. With the possible exception of the ecumenical Southern Ontario Sanctuary Coalition, (16) none of the twenty-seven other instances examined suggest support was limited to members of the specific Christian congregation or parish in whose church the migrant(s) resided.
This community character of sanctuary practices exemplary of pastoral power suggests that this rationality is not exclusively a form of Christian church or faith-based governance but is of wider relevance. While there remains a definite affinity for Christian faith-based aspects, the social organization of sanctuary suggests they are neither necessary nor sufficient for the identification of pastoral power.
Pastoral governance constitutes authority in the figure of a shepherd. (17) In...
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