Between insider and outsider strategies : exploring professionalised NGO refugee advocacy in Switzerland

Author(s) : Irina Sille

Source : https://libra.unine.ch/handle/123456789/34997

Abstract:

This study investigates advocacy strategies of professionalised non-governmental organisations in the domain of asylum. To understand the strategies of this specific type of actor, it mobilises a theoretical framework that combines a variety of perspectives and concepts from political sociology and critical migration and refugee studies. Based on expert interviews with NGO professionals, observations and documents produced and published by the organisations, the thesis analyses the strategic mobilisation of the NGOs’ and their professionals’ resources to influence national asylum law, policy and their implementation in Switzerland. Focusing on two case studies, it shows how two professionalised advocacy organisations engage in insider and outsider strategies within the specific political opportunity structure of the Swiss political system of direct and consensus democracy. By analysing how NGO professionals interact with different actors and the resources that they mobilise in these contexts, the study sheds light on the central role that legal expertise and the mobilisation of its instrumental and symbolic dimensions play in the organisations’ advocacy strategies. By doing so, it uncovers processes of depoliticisation in which the organisations engage through the mobilisation of their professionals’ legal expertise and (self-)perceived expert status. In a context in which the issue of asylum is increasingly politicised, the juridification of claims by the NGOs presents the organisations’ claims as politically neutral by defining issues linked to asylum in legal terms and by presenting themselves as consensus-favouring actors. More generally, the self-perception and representation as neutral experts are closely linked to credibility concerns that guide the organisations’ advocacy strategies.

Keywords: refugee advocacy, professionalisation, NGO, expertise, legal mobilisation, juridification, insider and outsider strategies, frames, human rights, humanitarian reasoning, plaidoyer en faveur des réfugié-e-s, professionnalisation, ONG, mobilisation du droit, juridicisation, stratégies d’insider et d’outsider, droits humains, raison humanitaire