Volume 3 issue 2 December 2015

Grassroots Asylum and Legal Strategies: A Case Study of the US Sanctuary Movement

Simon Behrman​
​This article introduces the concept of ‘grassroots asylum’ to describe a long tradition of offering spaces of protection beyond the sphere of sovereign law. This concept is deployed in contrast to the framework of international refugee law, which is commonly understood to be humanitarian in nature, and yet which inhibits the ability of most forced migrants to gain asylum. The central argument of this article is that the failure to question many of the underlying assumptions about international refugee law can end up compromising the aims of grassroots asylum, and reinforces many of the legal paradigms that divide the ‘deserving’ from the ‘undeserving’ migrant. To illustrate the conflict between these two paradigms we examine some of the experiences of the US Sanctuary Movement.