The slow violence of austerity politics and the UK’s ‘hostile environment’: Examining the responses of third sector organisations supporting people seeking asylum

Benwell, Matthew C; Hopkins, Peter; Finlay, Robin

Abstract

Around the globe, people seeking asylum are subject to ever-increasing levels of securitisation, surveillance, hostility and violence. In the UK, successive Labour and Conservative governments have sought to create an increasingly 'hostile environment' for people without leave to remain in the country, generating and perpetuating anti-immigrant sentiment in the process. This paper centres attention on the implications of this politics of hostility, which has combined with sweeping levels of austerity, for third sector organisations in and around a city situated in the North East of England. We specifically focus on organisations offering cultural, sporting and artistic activities to gain an insight into how the ways they operate are affected by the UK's immigration and austerity politics. Through researcher volunteering and observation at several organisations and interviews with people associated with them, we document some of the shared practices of quiet care and solidarity, in spite of the significant funding challenges they face. We show how these organisations are providing a crucial support structure to people seeking asylum, offering shared spaces that facilitate the 'doing together' of various activities. However, we also show how these third sector responses, and the people who attend them, are shaped and constrained by this hostile politics. We examine how organisations initially set up to focus on the provision of cultural and artistic activities are increasingly having to tailor their services to provide vitally important forms of support through the provision of, for example, food, clothing and assistance with bureaucratic (but essential) form-filling. The paper makes a key contribution to the relatively scant literature on cultural and artistic initiatives in the third sector set up for people seeking asylum and calls for sensitive academic critiques of the sector that forefront state structural violence and the socio-political contexts in which asylum sector organisations operate.

Citation

Benwell, M. C., Hopkins, P., & Finlay, R. (2023). The slow violence of austerity politics and the UK’s ‘hostile environment’: Examining the responses of third sector organisations supporting people seeking asylum. Geoforum, 145, Article 103845. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103845

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Aug 21, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Aug 29, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023-10
• Deposit Date: Sep 5, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Sep 5, 2023
• Journal: Geoforum
• Print ISSN: 0016-7185
• Electronic ISSN: 1872-9398
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 145
• Article Number: 103845
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.geoforum.2023.103845
• Keywords: Sociology and Political Science
• Public URL: https://durham-repository.worktribe.com/output/1730186