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The 1999 Immigration and Asylum Act marked a watershed moment for the politics of asylum in the UK, setting the discursive groundwork for the now infamous 'hostile environment'. This article is the first to compare the discursive framings of this formative act by the Home Office and UK government with those of the then newly devolved Welsh political institutions. While exploring the dominant visions of asylum as fear, unease and hostility marking the act, this paper highlights contrasting national narratives and imaginaries of welcome and hospitality in Welsh institutions. Drawing on a discourse analysis of archived policy documents, newspapers and interview material, the paper argues that these emerging hospitable imaginaries constituted a form of Welsh national identity formation against a less hospitable 'Other'- the UK sovereign state. This article contributes to the critical migration literature by questioning if the notion of hospitality involves more than the ambivalent framing of non-citizens as guests and others, or if instead it is more intended to differentiate from sovereign responses to asylum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents a study of the geopolitical reasoning of the Georgian Orthodox Church (GOC) and its leader Patriarch Ilia II regarding the question of Georgia's territorial integrity. Does the GOC's territorial discourse complement or challenge Georgia's territorial nationalism? The empirical analysis of the geopolitical discourses of Patriarch Ilia II in the early 1990s and in the wake of the 2008 August (Russia-Georgia) War shows a complicated relationship between spiritual and secular geopolitical discourses on Georgia's territorial integrity. Ilia's spiritual geopolitics is neither dissident nor entirely complementary. The Patriarch's definition of Georgia's territorial integrity eschews the broadly accepted formulation of "Russian occupation" within Georgia and in its place, insufficient faith and religiosity within the Georgian society take a more prominent place in the explanation of the problem's origins. Ilia II defines the religion and the GOC as the unifying factor, spiritually, territorially, and politically, of the rival parties and alienated peoples and territories. The church's canonical territoriality, rather than the state's sovereign territoriality, plays the key object of concern in the Patriarch's geopolitical discourse. However, Ilia II frames this narrow institutional interest of the church as the basis for the nation's territorial unification. By advocating more narrowly for the GOC's canonical jurisdiction across the entire disputed territories, rather than actively embracing secular anti-Russian geopolitical narratives, the church simultaneously stands outside of the territorial conflict, taking a seemingly neutral position, and reinforces the territorial claim of the Georgian state. By distinguishing and problematizing the role of GOC's canonical territoriality in the question of Georgia's sovereign territoriality, the paper concludes that the GOC is a territorial power in its own right, not merely a spiritual wing of the state of Georgia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]