Hostname: page-component-599cfd5f84-9hh9z Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2025-01-07T07:48:04.753Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Oppressed, the Suspect, and the Citizen: Subjectivity in Competing Accounts of Political Violence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 December 2018

Susan Bibler Coutin
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

By juxtaposing religious, legal, and victims'accounts of political violence, this essay identifies and critiques assumptions about agency, the individual, and the state that derive from liberal theory and that underlie U.S. asylum law. In the United States, asylum is available to aliens whose gooernments fail to protect them from persecution on the basis of their race, religion, political opinion, nationality, or social group membership. Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants have challenged this definition of persecution with their two-decade-long struggle for asylum in the United States. During the 1980s, U.S. religious advocates and solidarity workers took legal action on behalf of what they characterized as victims of oppression in Central America. The asylum claims narrated by the beneficiaries of these legal efforts suggest that repessiwe pactices rendered entire populations politically suspect. To prevail in immigration court, however, victims had to prove that they were individually targeted because of being somehow “different” from the population at large. In other words, to obtain asylum, persecution victims had to explain how and why their actions had placed them at risk, even though persecution obscured the reasons that particular individuals were targeted and thus rendered all politically suspect.

Type
Symposium: Law, Religion, and Identity
Information
Law & Social Inquiry , Volume 26 , Issue 1 , Winter 2001 , pp. 63 - 94
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 2001 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Anker, Deborah E. 1992. Determining Asylum Claims in the United States: A Case Study on the Implementation of Legal Norms in an Unstructured Adjudicatory Environment. New York University Review of Law and Social Change 19(3):433–528.Google Scholar
Bach, Robert L. 1990. Immigration and U.S. Foreign Policy in Latin America and the Caribbean. In Tucker, et al. 1990.Google Scholar
Bellah, Robert N. 1975. The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in Time of Trial. New York: Seabury.Google Scholar
Bellah, Robert N., Madsen, Richard, Sullivan, William N., Swidler, Ann, and Steven Tipton, M. 1985. Habits of the Heart: Individdism and Commitment in American Life. New York: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Bercovitch, Sacvan. 1978. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.Google Scholar
Berryman, Phillip. 1984. The Religious Roots of Rebellion. New York: Maryknoll.Google Scholar
Bhabha, Jacqueline. 1996. Embodied Rights: Gender Persecution, State Sovereignty, and Refugees. Public Culture 9:3–32.Google Scholar
Blum, Carolyn Patty. 1991. The Settlement of American Baptist Churches v. Thornburgh: Landmark Victory for Central American Asylum-Seekers. International Journal of Refugee Law 3(2):347–56.Google Scholar
Bosniak, Linda S. 1996. Opposing Prop. 187: Undocumented Immigrants and the National Imagination. Connecticut Law Review. 28(3):555–619.Google Scholar
Bourdieu, Pierre. 1987. The Force of Law: Toward a Sociology of the Juridical Field, trans. Richard Terdiman. Hastings Law Journal 38:805–53.Google Scholar
Brubaker, Rogers. 1992. Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Byrne, Hugh. 1996. El Salvador's Ciwil War: A Study of Revolution. Boulder, Colo. Lynne Rienner.Google Scholar
Cardenal, Ernesto. 1976. The Gospel in Soletiname. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books.Google Scholar
Christiansen, Drew S. J. 1996. Movement, Asylum, Borders: Christian Perspectives. International Migration Review 30(1):7–17.Google Scholar
Churgin, Michael J. 1996. Mass Exoduses: The Response of the United States. International Migration Review 30(1):310–25.Google Scholar
Collier, Jane, Maurer, Bill, and Suárez-Navaz, Liliana. 1995. Sanctioned Identities: Legal Constructions of Modern Personhood. Identities 2(1–2):1–28.Google Scholar
Coutin, Susan Bibler. 1993a. The Chicago Seven and the Sanctuary Eleven: Conspiracy and Spectacle within U.S. Courts. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 16(3):19–28.Google Scholar
Coutin, Susan Bibler 1993b. The Culture of Protest: Religious Activism and the U.S. Sanctuary Movement. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Coutin, Susan Bibler 1994. Enacting Law as Social Practice: The US. Sanctuary Movement as a Mode of Resistance. In Contested States: Law, Hegemony, and Resistance, ed. Hirsch, Susan and Lazarus-Black, Mindie. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Coutin, Susan Bibler 1995. Smugglers or Samaritans in Tucson, Arizona: Producing and Contesting Legal Truth. American Ethnologist 22(3):549–71.Google Scholar
Coutin, Susan Bibler 1998. From Refugees to Immigrants: The Legalization Strategies of Salvadoran Immigrants and Activists. International Migration Review 32(4):901–25.Google Scholar
Daniel, E. Valentine. 1996. Charred Lullabies: Chapters in an Anthropography of Violence. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Dominguez, Jorge I. 1990. Immigration as Foreign Policy in U.S.-Latin American Relations. In Tucker, et al. 1990.Google Scholar
Feldman, Allen. 1991. Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Ferris, Elizabeth G. 1987. The Central American Refugees. New York: Praeger.Google Scholar
Fiederlein, Suzanne L. 1991. Interpreting International and Domestic Law Concerning Refugees: The U.S. Government vs. the Sanctuary Movement. Journal of Borderlands Studies 6(1):23–50.Google Scholar
Garth, Bryant G. 1992. Power and Legal Artifice: The Federal Class Action. Law and Society Review 26(2):237–72.Google Scholar
Green, Linda. 1994. Fear As a Way of Life. Cultural Anthropology 9(2):227–56.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol. 1986. Praying for Justice: Faith, Order, and Community in an American Town. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol 1996. A Moment's Notice: Time Politics Across Cultures. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.Google Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol, Yngvesson, Barbara, and David Engel, M. 1994. Law and Community in Three American Towns. Ithaca, N.Y.: Comell University Press.Google Scholar
Gutierrez, Gustavo. 1973. A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salwation, trans. Caridad Inda, Sister and Eagleson, John. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis Books.Google Scholar
Halliday, Terence C., and Karpik, Lucien, eds. 1997. Lawyers and the Rise of Western Political Liberalism: Europe and North America from the Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Immigration and Naturalization Service. Department of Justice. 1999. Suspension of Deportation and Special Rule Cancellation of Removal for Certain Nations of Guatemala, E1 Salvador, and Former Soviet Bloc Countries. 64 Federal Register 27, 855–82.Google Scholar
Ishay, Micheline R. 1997. The Human Rights Reader: Major Political Essays, Speeches, and Documents from the Bible to the Present. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Jaggar, Alison M. 1983. Feminist Politics and Human Nature. Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Allanheld.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Janis H. 1991. The State Construction of Affect: Political Ethos and Mental Health among Salvadoran refugees. Culture, Medicine, and Psychiatry 15:139–65.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Janis H. 1996. The Impress of Extremity: Women's Experience of Trauma and Political Violence. In Gender and Health: An International Perspective, ed. Carolyn Sargent, F. and Caroline Brettell, B. Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice Hall.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Janis H. 1998. The Medical Anthropology of Political Violence: A Cultural and Feminist Agenda. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 12(1): 122–31.Google Scholar
Jenkins, Janis H., and Valiente, Martha. 1994. Bodily Transactions of the Passions: El Calor among Salvadoran Women Refugees. In Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas Scordas, J. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Kennedy, Edward M. 1981. Refugee Act of 1980. International Migration Review 15(1–2):141–56.Google Scholar
Kristeva, Julia. 1991. Strangers to Ourselves, trans. Leon Roudiez, S. New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
Lernoux, Penny. 1982. Cry of the People. New York: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Macpherson, C. B. 1962. The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford, G.B.: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
MacLeod, Murdo J. 1985. A Historical View of Central America. In Sanctuary: A Resource Guide for Understanding and Participating in the Central American Refugees' Struggle, ed. MacEoin, Gary. San Francisco: Harper and Row.Google Scholar
Mahler, Sara J. 1995. American Dreaming: Immigrant Life on the Margins. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Malamud-Goti, Jaime. 1996. Game without End: State Terror and the Politics of justice. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Malkki, Liisa. 1992. National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of National Identity Among Scholars and Refugees. Cultural Anthropology 7(1):24–44.Google Scholar
Matoesian, Gregory M. 1993. Reproducing Rape: Domination through Talk in the Courtroom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Matoesian, Gregory M. 1997. “You Were Interested in Him as a Person?”: Rhythms of Domination in the Kennedy Smith Rape Trial. Law and Social inquiry 22(1):55–93.Google Scholar
McGuire-King, William. 1982. The Biblical Base of the Social Gospel. In The Bible and Social Reform, ed. Ernest Sandeen, R. Philadelphia: Fortress Press.Google Scholar
Mehta, Uday S. 1997. Liberal Strategies of Exclusion. In Tensions of Empire: Colonial Cultures in a Bourgeois World ed. Cooper, Frederick and Laura Stoler, Ann. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Menchü, Rigoberta, and Burgos-Debray, Elisabeth. 1984. I … Rigoberta Menchú, trans. Wright, Ann. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle. 1994. Narrating Domestic Violence: Producing the Truth of Violence in 19th- and 20th-Century Hawaiian Courts. Law and Social Inquiry 19(4):967–94.Google Scholar
Merry, Sally Engle 1995. Resistance and the Cultural Power of Law. Law and Society Review 29(1):11–26.Google Scholar
Minow, Martha. 1998. Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Molotch, Harvey L., and Boden, Deirdre. 1985. Talking Social Structure: Discourse, Domination, and the Watergate Hearings. American Socilogical Review 50:273–88.Google Scholar
O'Brien, D. J. and Shannon, T. A., eds. 1992. Renewing the Earth: Catholic Documents on Peace, Justice, and Liberation. Garden City, N.Y.: Image Books.Google Scholar
Pastor, Robert A. 1984. Continuity and Change in U.S. Foreign Policy: Carter and Reagan on El Salvador. Journal of Policy Analysis and Management 3(1):175–90.Google Scholar
Paul, Benjamin D., and Demarest, William J. 1988. The Operation of a Death Squad in San Pedro la Laguna. In Harvest of Violence: The Maya Indians and the Guatemalan Crisis, ed. Robert Carmack, M. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.Google Scholar
Pirie, Sophie H. 1990. The Origins of a Political Trial: The Sanctuary Movement and Political Justice. Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. 2(2):381–416.Google Scholar
Plaut, W. Gunther. 1996. Jewish Ethics and International Migrations. International Migration Review 30(1): 18–26.Google Scholar
Scany, Elaine. 1985. The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. New York: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Schirmer, Jennifer G. 1985. A Different Reality: The Central American Refugee and the Lawyer. Immigration Newsletter 14(5):6–9.Google Scholar
Schirmer, Jennifer G. 1988. “Those Who Die for Life Cannot be Called Dead”: Women and Human Rights Protest in Latin America. Human Rights Yearbook 1:41–76.Google Scholar
Shapiro, Michael J. 1994. Moral Geographies and the Ethics of Post-Sovereignty. Public Culture 6:479–502.Google Scholar
Smith, Christian. 1996. Resisting Reagan: The U.S. Central America Peace Movement. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Stephen, Lynn. 1994. Hear My Testimony: Maria Teresa Tula, Human Rights Activist of El Salvador. Boston: South End Press.Google Scholar
Stephen, Lynn 1995. Women's Rights are Human Rights: The Merging of Feminine and Feminist Interests among El Salvador's Mothers of the Disappeared (CO-MADRES). American Ethnologist 22(4):807–27.Google Scholar
Suarez-Orozco, Marcelo M. 1987. The Treatment of Children in the “Dirty War”: Ideology, State Terrorism, and the Abuse of Children in Argentina. In Child Survival: Anthropological Perspectives on the Treatment and Maltreatment of Children, ed. Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. Boston: D. Reidel.Google Scholar
Taylor, Diana. 1997. Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina's “Dirty War.” Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Taussig, Michael. 1984. Culture of Terror—Space of Death. Roger Casement's Putumayo Report and the Explanation of Torture. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 26(3):467–97.Google Scholar
Tucker, Robert W., Charles Keely, B., and Wrigley, Linda, eds. 1990. Immigration and U.S. Foreign Policy. Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press.Google Scholar
Ugalde, Antonio, and Rodolfo Vega, R. 1989. Review Essay: State Terrorism, Torture, and Health in the Southern Cone. Social Science and Medicine 28(7):759–67.Google Scholar
USCR (United States Committee on Refugees). 1986. Despite a Generow Spirit. Washington, D.C.: American Council for Nationalities Service.Google Scholar
Wagner-Pacifici, Robin. 1994. Discourse and Destruction: The City of Philadelphia versus MOVE. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
White, Ronald C. Jr., and Howard Hopkins, C. 1976. The Social Gospel: Religion and Reform in Changing America. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.Google Scholar
Zolberg, Aristide R. 1990. The Roots of U.S. Refugee Policy. In Tucker, et al. 1990.Google Scholar