Moral visions of sanctuary across the great divides in contemporary political philosophy

ABSTRACT

What are the most important conceptions of ‘sanctuary’ in relation to citizenship and community, and how do today’s sanctuary cities engage with such lines of thinking? This paper examines the moral visions underlying and animating many of today's sanctuary cities in the United States in order to illustrate how local communities have adopted a combination of liberal, communitarian and cosmopolitan perspectives in social and political philosophy. By tracing the recent history of the sanctuary cities movement and examining current public discourses among community leaders and activists in several leading sanctuary cities, the analysis shows how the idea of ‘sanctuary’ works across principles of individual freedom and human rights as emblematic within liberalism, notions of solidarity, social trust and local self-determination in communitarianism, and aspirations for shared responsibility and the advancement of human dignity as found in cosmopolitanism.

KEYWORDS:

• Liberalism
• communitarianism
• cosmopolitanism
• sanctuary city
• sanctuary movement
• civil society
• immigration

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers of this manuscript for their invaluable comments, as well as participants at the workshop ‘Cities and the Contentious Politics of Migration' held at the 2018 annual conference of the International Studies Association.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hans Schattle

Hans Schattle works across the usual dividing lines in political science and international relations, with interests ranging from globalization, citizenship, media and democracy to the politics of Europe and East Asia. He has written two books, Globalization and citizenship and The practices of global citizenship, both published by Rowman & Littlefield, as well as numerous articles in academic journals and commentaries in newspapers, including The New York Times / International Herald Tribune, The Guardian and The Christian Science Monitor. He earned his doctorate in politics at Oxford under the supervision of David Marquand, and most recently he has co-edited with Dr. Jeremy Nuttall the volume Making social democrats: Citizens, mindsets, realities, published by Manchester University Press in honour of Professor Marquand. Professor Schattle presents research papers regularly at leading international academic conferences and often gives interviews to journalists around the world; he worked as a news reporter in his native New England before launching his academic career.