The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum

Dr Vicki Squire's newly published book, The Exclusionary Politics of Asylum (2009 on Palgrave Macmillan), critically considers recent political debates around asylum seeking in the UK and Europe. The issue of asylum has become the focus of intense debate over recent years, much of which is organized around questions regarding how far and in what ways increasing numbers of asylum seekers pose a 'problem' or a 'threat' to 'host' states. Dr Squire's book steps back from this debate in order to consider how, why and with what effects such questions have come to take such a hold in UK and EU contexts. Critiquing the securitisation and criminalisation of asylum seeking, it analyses recent policy developments in relation to their wider historical, political and European contexts, and argues that the UK response effectively produces asylum seekers as scapegoats for dislocations that are caused by the shifting boundaries of the nation state. Any move beyond such an exclusionary politics, it claims, requires a distinctly political re-thinking of asylum, as well as of citizenship more widely.