MIGRATION AS MORALITY POLITICS
The Contentious Politics of Sanctuary in Europe and the United States
Publications
Key publications in scientific journals made between 2019 and 2023 within the scope of the project.
Journal Article
2022
Mourão Permoser, Julia
Countries across Europe have been confronted with pro-migrant solidarity movements that engage both organized civil society and local political actors. The church asylum movement in Germany has revived the ancient practice of solidarity, drawing upon both its history and symbolism. The movement has also reshaped social and political contours. In this working paper, Julia Mourão Permoser explains that though church asylum has sparked controversy and elevated tensions between religious communities and governments, activists justify their actions on normative grounds.
Special Issue
2022
Mourão Permoser, Julia, Rainer Bauböck and Martin Ruhs (Eds.)
This Special Issue of Migration Studies—and the larger new research program that it initiates — analyzes fundamental ethical dilemmas in policy making on migration and refugee protection. In doing so, it seeks to bring a new perspective to normative debates in migration studies: one that finds its point of departure in concrete policy dilemmas as faced by actors on the ground, and that works from there inductively toward more abstract normative theorizing.
Journal Article
2022
Bauböck, Rainer, Julia Mourão Permoser and Martin Ruhs
This article proposes a new approach to the political theory of migration: the ethics of migration policy dilemmas. The core of this new approach lies in identifying specific policy dilemmas of central relevance to policy makers and other stakeholders in the field, and then submitting these dilemmas to systematic theoretical analysis. We conceptualize policy dilemmas as involving hard choices between competing moral goals and distinguish this kind of dilemma from other types of ethical choices, such as conflicting means, dirty hands, political feasibility, and politics dilemmas. We argue that, besides enlarging the range of questions asked by political theorists of migration, our approach of engaging normatively with hard policy dilemmas can help mitigate the negative political and societal effects of reductionist political positions that seek to negate the existence of competing moral goals.
Book Chapter
2022
Mourão Permoser, Julia
This chapter investigates the democratic challenges surrounding the Church Asylum Movement in Germany. It focuses in particular on how church asylum generates principled political conflicts over secularism and rule of law. Despite having lost its legal standing, church asylum remained part of the cultural imaginary of many Christian societies, so much that, at specific historical times, churches have mobilized this ancient tradition and offered refuge to certain groups in defiance of the legislation in force. The German Church Asylum Movement is not only one of the oldest existing such movements but also one of the biggest. Until the mid-2010s, there were fewer than 100 cases per year; then there was a dramatic increase from 79 cases in 2013 to 430 cases in 2014. Between 2014 and 2018, the numbers continued to rise, achieving the impressive figure of 1,325 cases in 2018.
Journal Article
2022
Mann, Itamar and Julia Mourão Permoser
In this article, we concentrate on the dilemmas involved in search and rescue (SAR) as rescuers have described them. Our aim is two-fold. The first is to offer a phenomenological account of search-and-rescue dilemmas. The article sheds light on the complexity and nuance of the ethical landscape of maritime rescue, revealing an intricate web of interactions acknowledged by rescuers as posing ethical challenges. The second aim is to offer a conceptual framework for what it is that SAR NGOs are, in fact, doing. We contextualize their actions within the larger terrain of ‘border externalization’, in which states have moved enforcement activities to extraterritorial zones, where human rights law is diluted or inapplicable. We thus argue that the set of norms underlying NGO rescue practices amounts to a strategy of counter-externalization.
Book Chapter
2021
Mourão Permoser, Julia
Solidaritätsbewegungen, der Kirchenasylbewegung in Deutschland. Kirchenasyl bietet Asylbewerber_innen und Migrant_innen ohne regulären Status Zuflucht, um Abschiebungen zu verhindern und staatliche Institutionen zur Überprüfung von Asylanträgen zu zwingen. Kirchenasylaktivist_innen nutzen den Symbolcharakter der Kirche und das Widerstreben politischer Akteur_in- nen, einen von vielen als heilig empfundenen Raum zu verletzen, um einen sicheren Raum für Migrant_innen zu schaffen, in dem sie nicht von den Behörden aufgegriffen werden. Geographisch organisiert sich die Kirchenasylbewegung zugleich subnational, national und transnational.
Published in Die Stadt als Stätte der Solidarität, edited by Niki Kubaczek and Monika Mokre
Journal Article
2019
Mourão Permoser, Julia
This article critically reviews the literature on morality policies and the politics of values, focusing in particular on the question of what defines morality policies as a specific policy field. Drawing from both US American and European literature, it surveys to which extent morality policies can be understood as a particular form of contention over primary values, a way of framing, a cultural conflict, a specific type of politics, or a class of substantive policy issues. The article then develops a new approach that draws on political theory and pays particular attention to the role of religion, arguing that morality policies reflect deep divisions within modern societies over key principles of political liberalism.