African Witchcraft and Global Asylum-Seeking: Border-Crossing Beliefs

.This book analyzes how over the last two decades, immigration regimes in three primary refugee-receiving states in the Global North – Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom – have engaged with allegations about witchcraft-driven violence made by asylum seekers coming from Anglophone countries across the African continent. The work intervenes at the nexus of anthropological, historical, legal, developmental, and human rights literatures to offer fresh insights into extrajudicial violence and global migration. Taking witchcraft-based asylum cases as its focal point, it argues that the recent dramatic expansion in claims to refugee protection under the ‘particular social group’ category of the 1951 UN Refugee Convention reflects immigration authorities’ increasing willingness to consider how legally recognizable persecution can derive from cultural practices and beliefs. Reflecting critically on such cases, it advances understandings of how witchcraft beliefs and practices have persisted as significant engines of violence in the contemporary world. It sheds light both on the limits of legal pluralism and cultural relativism in asylum adjudication and on how social scientific expertise contributes not simply to the flow of ideas, but also to the channelling of people across national, cultural, and epistemological boundaries. The book will be essential reading for students and researchers in legal anthropology, African studies, human rights, transnational history, migration and refugee law and policy, and the history and anthropology of witchcraft.Additional ISBNs9781032128542, 9781003226482, 9781000860177African Witchcraft and Global Asylum-Seeking: Border-Crossing Beliefs 1st Edition is written by Katherine Luongo and published by Routledge. ISBNs for African Witchcraft and Global Asylum-Seeking are 9781000860184, 1000860183 and the print ISBNs are 9781032128474, 103212847X. Additional ISBNs include 9781032128542, 9781003226482, 9781000860177.