Sanctuary and solidarity: urban community responses to refugees and asylum seekers on three continents

The paper will also draw attention to a common thread of conflict that can be
identified in places where such community responses take place. It will show that
such conflicts arise between different layers of government, between secular laws and
moral and religious codes, between nuanced facets of political expediency, and
between the competing needs of different groups. This conflictual character marks out
many of the responses identified, and suggests that this is a sphere towards which
further attention should be directed in the future if their role is to be more completely
understood.

The paper takes a comparative approach, examining responses to vulnerable migrants
across a very wide geographical area. As Dancygier (2010) points out, there is a lack
of comparative work on host community and new arrival relations and conflicts. She
points out that most work is constructed in the form of quite detailed case studies.
Whilst these are indeed valuable, it is also important to investigate linkages between
sometimes outwardly disparate situations, which may have more in common from
which we can learn than might at first be obvious.

Following on from this, the paper will also take a broad view of the categories of
persons to whom communities respond either with support or negativity, adopting the
term ’vulnerable migrants’; this category includes refugees and asylum seekers, but
also undocumented migrants at risk of deportation or other punitive responses. It is
intended to signify those presenting themselves in another country as being in dire
circumstances and in need of refuge, that need arising from a broad range of reasons.