Paper short abstract:

What do Ghanaian men fearing being forced to become chief and Beninese women being coerced into a vodou community have in common? Both are examples of asylum application narratives before US and UK refugee tribunals, conveying forms of sociocultural violence that sit uncomfortably with refugee law.

Paper long abstract:

The exilic mobilities of African refugees are embedded with strategies of escape and survival revealing forms of sociocultural violence that sit uncomfortably with refugee law. Since the earliest efforts to globalize humanitarian protections with the 1951 Refugee Convention and the 1967 Protocol, Africans have struggled to find themselves represented in the classic five categories garnering protection: race, political opinion, nationality, particular social group (PSG) membership, and religion. In this paper, I demonstrate how two groups of refugees from sociocultural persecution - namely young Ghanaian men fearing being forced to become chief and young Beninese women being coerced into a vodou community - navigate resituating their experience within established legal frameworks. In recent decades, the PSG category has proved capacious and useful for African refugees. A vast spectrum of forms of persecution, many not historically documented prior to or during the drafting of the refugee convention, have found a plausible haven within the PSG framework. This paper asks, however, if refugee advocates may be underserving their clients and future asylum-seekers by passing on clearer or better-founded arguments anchored by alternative categories. In the case of chiefly disputes, I ask why political opinion is not a better fit, and with respect to vodou coercion, whether the caselaw on religious persecution provides sufficient protection. Moreover, by prioritizing a PSG over other potential protective categories, are such choices missing an important opportunity to decolonize refugee law and instead further reinstantiating Eurocentric and Western and Judeo-Christian monotheistic paradigms of political and religious persecution.