« The central demand by the Swiss refugee solidarity movement was that the State abide by the law in its asylum practice. This article discusses the affirmative critique of the law formulated by activists in the 1980 s. It does so by drawing on Jacques Rancière’s work on the relationship between politics and aisthesis:
in his account politics is not primarily about constitutions and laws, but about how the sensible texture of the community is configured, on which the meaning
of those laws and constitutions depends. Politically the movement subjectivized itself as the “other Switzerland”; under this name it disturbed the reigning “dis-
tribution of the sensible” by making the arcane asylum practice visible and open to critique in the first place. At the same time, the acts of civil disobedience the
movement employed complicated the question of who acts (il)legally and created a polemical stage for the law. It was in such paradoxical situations of communication, which Rancière calls “disagreements”, that the movement found an audience for its critique – a critique which previously had gone unheard within the established institutional framework. The most important effect of this disagreement brought about by the refugee solidarity movement was the introduction of judicial review in Swiss asylum law in the early 1990 s. » [Abstract]