Communitising Resettlement: The Politics and Practice of Sponsoring Refugees in the United Kingdom

Bottomley, Charlotte (2026) Communitising Resettlement: The Politics and Practice of Sponsoring Refugees in the United Kingdom. Doctoral thesis, University of East Anglia.

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Abstract

This thesis investigates the politics and practice of the UK’s Community Sponsorship Scheme for refugee resettlement. Launched in 2017, the scheme enables community groups to voluntarily assume the practical, emotional, and financial responsibility for integrating resettled refugees in their local area. Adopting a socio-legal ‘law and policy in action’ approach, this research probes the gap between government framing and ground-level implementation of the scheme. While policy and discourse frame it as a humanitarian public-private partnership building on a British tradition of state and civil society collaboration in refugee welcome, this study examines the views and experiences of those navigating the scheme in practice. It draws on critical theory and qualitative empirical research (semi-structured interviews and participant observation) conducted with community sponsors and local stakeholders in London between 2022 and 2023.

The findings reveal how sponsors’ moral motivations frequently collide with the bureaucratic, neoliberal, and racialising logics of the state, as they interact with central and local government, and navigate the welfare system, housing market, and administrative requirements of the scheme. It argues that while the government uses Community Sponsorship as a legitimising ‘counterweight’ to the UK’s increasingly restrictive asylum system, and a way to displace the material costs of refugee integration onto private citizens, sponsors are not passive participants in this process. Instead, they exhibit a ‘justice consciousness,’ reflexively attempting to ‘communitise’ resettlement by leveraging the state’s functional gaps in the process to resist exclusionary refugee politics and assert alternative visions of community-led solidarity and care.

Ultimately, the thesis proposes an alternative theorisation of the Community Sponsorship Scheme as a structurally ambivalent form of humanitarian government. It argues that its design, rooted in the neoliberal rationality of austerity, simultaneously enables and undermines the objectives of community sponsors, thereby constraining the scheme’s potential to meaningfully expand refugee protection in the UK.

Item Type:	Thesis (Doctoral)
Faculty \ School:	Faculty of Social Sciences > School of Law
Depositing User:	Amy Millward-Doherty
Date Deposited:	27 Aug 2026 08:47
Last Modified:	27 Aug 2026 08:47
URI:	https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/104310
DOI:

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