Skip to content
Apply
Stories

African Witchcraft and Global Asylum-Seeking: Border-Crossing Beliefs | Katherine Luongo

People in this story

image of book cover with title and colorful world map behind

Katherine Luongo, Associate Professor of History and International Affairs

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.

More Stories

Social media connectedness, Trump endorsements, and GOP outcomes in 2022 Senate races

10.04.2024

Is Melania Trump Her Husband’s October Surprise?

10.04.2024
Northeastern logo

Subgroup Meeting Points – 9/30 – 10/4

10.04.24
All Stories