Nationalism, Law and Statelessness


Book Description

In 1998 a bloody war erupted in The Horn of Africa between Ethiopia and Eritrea. During the war Ethiopia arrested and expelled 70,000 of its citizens, and stripped another 50,000-plus of their citzenship on the basis of their presumed ethnicity. Nationalism, Law and Statelessness: Grand Illusions in the Horn of Africa examines the events which led up to the war, documents the expulsions and denationalisations that took place and follows the flight of these stateless Ethiopians out of the Horn into Europe. The core issue examined is the link between sovereignty and statelessness as this plays out in The Horn of Africa and in the West. The book provides a valuable insight into how nations create and perpetuate statelessness, the failure of law, both national and international, to protect and address the plight of stateless persons, and the illusory nature of nationalism, citizenship and human rights in the modern age. The study is one of a very few which examines the problem of statelessness through the accounts of stateless persons themselves. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in anthropology, law, politics, African studies and refugee studies as well as professionals and all those interested in stateless persons in the West, including Eritreans, who continue to be denied basic rights.




Nationality and Statelessness under International Law


Book Description

This book identifies the rights of stateless people and outlines the major legal obstacles preventing the eradication of statelessness.




Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship


Book Description

When a person is not recognised as a citizen anywhere, they are typically referred to as ‘stateless’. This can give rise to challenges both for individuals and for the institutions that try to govern them. Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship breaks from tradition by relocating the ‘problem’ to be addressed from one of statelessness to one of citizenship. It problematises the governance of citizenship – and the use of citizenship as a governance tool – and traces the ‘problem of citizenship’ from global and regional governance mechanisms to national and even individual levels. With contributions from activists, affected persons, artists, lawyers, academics, and national and international policy experts, this volume rejects the idea that statelessness and stateless persons are a problem. It argues that the reality of statelessness helps to uncover a more fundamental challenge: the problem of citizenship.




Statelessness


Book Description

The story of how a much-contested legal category—statelessness—transformed the international legal order and redefined the relationship between states and their citizens. Two world wars left millions stranded in Europe. The collapse of empires and the rise of independent states in the twentieth century produced an unprecedented number of people without national belonging and with nowhere to go. Mira Siegelberg’s innovative history weaves together ideas about law and politics, rights and citizenship, with the intimate plight of stateless persons, to explore how and why the problem of statelessness compelled a new understanding of the international order in the twentieth century and beyond. In the years following the First World War, the legal category of statelessness generated novel visions of cosmopolitan political and legal organization and challenged efforts to limit the boundaries of national membership and international authority. Yet, as Siegelberg shows, the emergence of mass statelessness ultimately gave rise to the rights regime created after World War II, which empowered the territorial state as the fundamental source of protection and rights, against alternative political configurations. Today we live with the results: more than twelve million people are stateless and millions more belong to categories of recent invention, including refugees and asylum seekers. By uncovering the ideological origins of the international agreements that define categories of citizenship and non-citizenship, Statelessness better equips us to confront current dilemmas of political organization and authority at the global level.




The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship


Book Description

Contrary to predictions that it would become increasingly redundant in a globalizing world, citizenship is back with a vengeance. The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship brings together leading experts in law, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and geography to provide a multidisciplinary, comparative discussion of different dimensions of citizenship: as legal status and political membership; as rights and obligations; as identity and belonging; as civic virtues and practices of engagement; and as a discourse of political and social equality or responsibility for a common good. The contributors engage with some of the oldest normative and substantive quandaries in the literature, dilemmas that have renewed salience in today's political climate. As well as setting an agenda for future theoretical and empirical explorations, this Handbook explores the state of citizenship today in an accessible and engaging manner that will appeal to a wide academic and non-academic audience. Chapters highlight variations in citizenship regimes practiced in different countries, from immigrant states to 'non-western' contexts, from settler societies to newly independent states, attentive to both migrants and those who never cross an international border. Topics include the 'selling' of citizenship, multilevel citizenship, in-between statuses, citizenship laws, post-colonial citizenship, the impact of technological change on citizenship, and other cutting-edge issues. This Handbook is the major reference work for those engaged with citizenship from a legal, political, and cultural perspective. Written by the most knowledgeable senior and emerging scholars in their fields, this comprehensive volume offers state-of-the-art analyses of the main challenges and prospects of citizenship in today's world of increased migration and globalization. Special emphasis is put on the question of whether inclusive and egalitarian citizenship can provide political legitimacy in a turbulent world of exploding social inequality and resurgent populism.




Border and Rule


Book Description

In Border and Rule, one of North America’s foremost thinkers and immigrant rights organizers delivers an unflinching examination of migration as a pillar of global governance and gendered racial class formation. Harsha Walia disrupts easy explanations for the migrant and refugee crises, instead showing them to be the inevitable outcomes of the conquest, capitalist globalization, and climate change that are generating mass dispossession worldwide. Border and Rule explores a number of seemingly disparate global geographies with shared logics of border rule that displace, immobilize, criminalize, exploit, and expel migrants and refugees. With her keen ability to connect the dots, Walia demonstrates how borders divide the international working class and consolidate imperial, capitalist, and racist nationalist rule. Ambitious in scope and internationalist in orientation, Border and Rule breaks through American exceptionalist and liberal responses to the migration crisis and cogently maps the lucrative connections between state violence, capitalism, and right-wing nationalism around the world. Illuminating the brutal mechanics of state formation, Walia exposes US border policy as a product of violent territorial expansion, settler-colonialism, enslavement, and gendered racial ideology. Further, she compellingly details how Fortress Europe and White Australia are using immigration diplomacy and externalized borders to maintain a colonial present, how temporary labor migration in the Arab Gulf states and Canada is central to citizenship regulation and labor control, and how racial violence is escalating deadly nationalism in the US, Israel, India, the Philippines, Brazil, and across Europe, while producing a disaster of statelessness for millions elsewhere. A must-read in these difficult times of war, inequality, climate change, and global health crisis, Border and Rule is a clarion call for revolution. The book includes a foreword from renowned scholar Robin D. G. Kelley and an afterword from acclaimed activist-academic Nick Estes.




Citizenship, Nationalism and Refugeehood of Rohingyas in Southern Asia


Book Description

This book provides an in-depth investigation of citizenship and nationalism in connection with the Rohingya community. It analyses the processes of production of statelessness in South Asia in general, and with regard to the Rohingyas in particular. Following the persecution of the Rohingya community in Myanmar (Burma) by the military and the Buddhist militia, a host of texts, mostly descriptive, have examined the historical, political and cultural roots of the genocidal massacre and the flight of its victims to South Asia and South-East Asian countries. The UNHCR reports describe the plight of Rohingyas during and after their journey, while other works focus on the political-economic roots of this ethnic conflict and its consequences for the Rohingyas. To date, very few theoretical insights have been provided on the Rohingya issue. This book seeks to fill that gap, and explores a dialogue between the state and its citizens and non-citizens that results in the production of statelessness. In theoretical terms, the book addresses the construction of citizens and non-citizens on the part of the state, and the process of symbolic othering, achieved through various state practices couched in terms of nationalism. Extensive case studies from India, Myanmar and Bangladesh provide the foundation for a robust theoretical argument. Given its scope, the book will be of interest to students, academics and researchers with a focus on political economy in South Asia in general and/or refugee studies in particular.




Narratives of Statelessness and Political Otherness


Book Description

This book argues that citizenship is an inadequate solution to the problem of statelessness based on a critical investigation of the lived experiences of Kurdish and Palestinian diasporas in western Europe. It examines how statelessness affects identity formations, homelessness, belonging, non-belonging, otherness, voices, status, (non)recognition, (dis)respect, (in)visibility and presence in the uneven world of nation-states. It also demonstrates that the undoing of non-sovereign identities’ subjection to structural subalternization and everyday inferiorization requires rights in excess of the mere acquisition of juridical citizenship, which tends to assume national sameness. That assumption in turn involves sovereign practices of denial and assimilation of ethnic alterity. The book therefore highlights the necessity of de-ethnicizing and decolonizing unitary nation-states that are based on the politico-cultural supremacy of a single, “core” ethnicity as the sovereign legislator of the rules and regimes of national belonging and un-belonging. It therefore broaches questions of “majority” and “minority,” mobility, nationalism, home-making, equality, difference and universalism in the context of the nation-state and illustrates how stateless peoples such as Kurds and Palestinians endure and challenge their subordinate position in a hierarchical (geo-)political order and how in so doing remain bound by political otherness.




Statelessness in the European Union


Book Description

This work looks at the phenomenon of statelessness in Europe from a number of different perspectives. In the first instance it explores the legal position of statelessness in European and international law. It then provides a contemporary account of displaced populations in the European Union, drawing on case studies from the 'old' and the 'new' Europe: France, the United Kingdom, Estonia and Slovenia. Finally the editors suggest how the European Union might develop a legal response to statelessness. This innovative and important study will be of huge interest to European lawyers specialising in immigration and citizenship and to political scientists in the field. It will also appeal to international and human rights lawyers.




Bureaucracy, Law and Dystopia in the United Kingdom's Asylum System


Book Description

The central concern of this book is to find answers to fundamental questions about the British asylum system and how it operates. Based on ethnographic research over a two-year period, the work follows and analyses numerous asylum appeals through the British courts. It draws on myriad interviews with individuals and a thorough examination of many state and non-state organizations to understand how the system works. While the organization of the book reflects the formal asylum process, a focus on specific legal appeals reveals the ‘political’ factors at play as different institutions and actors seek to influence judicial decision-making and overturn/uphold official asylum policy. The final chapter draws on the author’s ethnographic findings of the UK’s ‘asylum field’ to re-examine research on the Refugee Determination System in the US, Canada and Australia which has narrowly focused on judicial decision-making. It argues that analysis of Refugee Determination Systems must be situated and studied as part of a wider, political, semi-autonomous ‘asylum field’ which needs to be better understood. Providing an in-depth ethnographic study of a national asylum system and of immigration law and practice, the book will be an invaluable resource for academics, researchers and policy-makers in the UK and beyond working in this highly topical area.




Recent Books