SOAS Research Online

Abstract

The rhetoric following 11 September 2001 was full of talk of operations and battles that would be fought out of the public view, in an effort to prepare voting publics for a conflict of indeterminate scope, duration, and indeed, of place. Locational issues were quickly made central to the new war. ‘Sanctuaries’, ‘safe havens’, ‘operating environments’, ‘enabling environments’: these were the buzzwords for the long war. They were not new terms of reference, however. Conceptually, sanctuary implies a complex terrain composed of numerous paradigms, correlates, and characteristics. There is also a long and rich history of sanctuary concepts and practices, the lessons of which suggest that perhaps it is more appropriate to think of the issues not in terms of static, grid-referenced points on a map, but as systemic gaps, cracks, elisions, or voids – or perhaps as a series of evolving perspectives, processes and conditions.