Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship

Tendayi Bloom, Lindsey N. Kingston, Tendayi Bloom, Lindsey N. Kingston

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526156419
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526156402
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Law

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.

Part I

Producing and maintaining statelessness

Figure 1

New Democracy II

Shabu Mwangi

Shabu Mwangi’s work focuses on structural violence in society, notions of rootlessness and alienation (particularly the trauma of forced migration), and the reality of finding oneself excluded from a society’s vision of itself. His work examines identity and the constant struggle of negotiating one’s perception of self against socially established and enforced collective identities. Mwangi’s work studies various forms of violence arising from social, economic, and political divisions. He looks at our interaction with one another (and our situations) and the motivation behind action taken during volatile political periods.

1

The problem of citizenship in global governance

Tendayi Bloom¹

Today’s global governance structures suffer from an underlying ‘citizenism’. That is, in order to be seen as a full participant in the global system, usually a person must first be recognised as a citizen of a state.² This produces contradictions in global governance projects, which I show in this chapter through two examples. First, while a stated aim of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) is to ‘leave no one behind’, stateless persons are often unaccounted for in the implementation and monitoring of global development efforts. As a result, they can be left out entirely. Second, presuming citizenship means that policies ostensibly contributing to the global governance of migration target people without any citizenship, including those who have never crossed a border, as ‘illegal immigrants’. In both cases, the implications for stateless persons seem to follow at least in part from an underlying presumption of, and deference to, citizenship. The mandate for addressing statelessness officially sits with the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) (e.g., discussed in Seet, 2016). However, the obligation to address the problem of citizenship falls much wider.

The problem of citizenship here is particularly insidious. This is because it affects not only the content of global governance, but also who is able to participate in constructing, maintaining, and reforming it. This exclusion from participation both in the world and in the conference rooms makes it less likely for the problem of citizenship to be challenged, and makes the project of developing more inclusive systems more difficult. I conclude this chapter by arguing that rather than merely seeing statelessness as a problem in the international system, it is crucial to problematise the citizenism that makes statelessness so burdensome – including unpicking the common conflation of ‘citizen’ with person in global governance discourses. Given citizenism may often be invisible to citizens, any project to address it will need to seek out and defer to the expertise of those with direct experience of the problems it creates, and to that of stateless persons in particular.

Ideological and administrative understandings of citizenship

Citizenship is a powerful concept in global governance, both ideologically and administratively. The relationship between the ideological and administrative faces of citizenship’s power can create tensions. Ideologically, modern citizenship includes the idea that a citizen of a state is more than a subject of a ruler. The conditions and implications of citizenship are, then, tied up with state sovereignty and self-determination, and so with a presumption that a state has the right to choose its citizens.

This means that citizenship can be made dependent on a person’s place of birth, the immigration or marital status of their parents, and even the ethnicity or religion of their family. Naturalisation, or obtaining citizenship after birth, can be made dependent on even more factors, including a person’s bank balance, adherence to a set of values, or passing a series of knowledge or language tests. Throughout this book, authors present the challenges posed by making participation in one’s home society dependent upon such factors. However, when seen on the global level, additional challenges emerge from a state’s unilateral ability to govern citizenship.

Administratively, citizenship is the dominant way in which people are organised globally. It is how we know which state has which responsibilities towards a particular person. In practice, it should not be surprising that the ideological governance of access to citizenship may leave some people out. Difficulties for global governance emerge because administrative citizenship and ideological citizenship are assumed to be coextensive. Consequently, the ideological governance of citizenship has significant implications for global administrative structures. In the work towards the Sustainable Development Goals, people without any citizenship can be left out of consideration entirely, while in migration governance those without citizenship risk being targeted specifically. In both of these cases, problems arise because mechanisms based on the governance of nationhood are made fundamental to the administration of global governance.³

Citizenship and development

Citizenship of a state is often implicitly necessary for a person’s inclusion in global development efforts. Adopted in 2015, the UN Sustainable Development Agenda set out seventeen goals (the Sustainable Development Goals, or ‘SDGs’) for the following fifteen years (United Nations, 2015b). These goals address issues such as poverty, hunger, and sanitation; they address access to education, to justice, and to finance; and sustainability in industry, in agriculture, and in aquaculture. There is a series of targets within each goal, and for each target there are indicators for measuring progress. For example, Goal One (to end poverty) includes targets such as eradicating extreme poverty (Target 1.1) and implementing ‘nationally appropriate social protection systems’ (Target 1.3).

While these targets may seem universal, in practice they risk bypassing people without citizenship. First, populations without citizenship may go uncounted in demographic poverty measures. Uncounted, they are more easily overlooked by Target 1.1 (see Chattopadhyay, 2016). Second, without any recognised status, such persons may be defined as ineligible for the social protection of Target 1.3 by the state in which they live (van Waas and de Chickera, 2017). For example, in this volume Ahmad Benswait describes how, as members of the Bidoon community in Kuwait, he and his family have struggled to access education and healthcare. The problem of citizenship produces invisibility and exclusion of stateless persons in various ways across the Sustainable Development Agenda.

Criticisms of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), on whose heels the Sustainable Development Goals followed, included the concern that it reinforced a status quo in which some states, and so also their citizens, are dependent upon others. That is, it focused on aid and on transferring resources (with particular focus on development in Africa) rather than engaging with the structures that produce this dependence and domination (Aleyomi and IseOlorunkanmi, 2012; Durokifa and Ijeoma, 2018; see also United Nations, 2000). I suggest that another side of this status quo is the presumption that individual people participate at the grace of recognised states, and that existing states not only select who to include in their own citizenries but also decide which other entities to recognise as citizenship-granting states.

The MDGs, then, were accused of incentivising states to aim for ‘low-hanging fruit’: to focus on those whose situations could be improved most easily within existing arrangements, rather than confronting problematic structures that help to keep people poor and excluded (Creppeau, 2014; see also United Nations, 2015b). For example, while Goal One of the MDGs was to eradicate extreme poverty and hunger, its targets ended up focusing merely on reducing the proportion of people in poverty in various dimensions. Some critics observed that the natural increase in the global population alone significantly weakened this commitment (e.g. Pogge, 2004: 319). It also made it possible to overlook people whose inclusion in development would be most politically sensitive (ODI, 2010: 9, 13). This included populations living in states that refuse to recognise their rights or even their existence (Kingston, 2017; van Waas and de Chickera, 2017). In leaving out stateless persons, the MDGs ‘could be failing to meet the needs of some of the world’s poorest’ (Tucker, 2013: 2).

As the period of the MDGs was ending and the SDGs were being developed, it was observed that some groups are often excluded from development decision-making (see United Nations, 2012: 58[j]‌ and 58[k]). This led to the key principle that in order to avoid some of the failings of the MDGs, in the SDGs, ‘no one should be left behind’ (see United Nations, 2015b: preamble; United Nations 2015a). Within the SDGs, ‘status’ is given as one of the categories according to which a person should not experience discrimination (United Nations, 2015b: para 19). Since people without any citizenship may well suffer discrimination based on their lack of ‘status’, this could be seen as referring to stateless persons. However, this is not how it plays out. While the SDGs do include the eradication of absolute poverty in Target 1.1, states are relied upon to decide who to include in this measure. This reliance risks importing national-level exclusions into global-level governance. That is, groups excluded from development efforts within particular states are also excluded from consideration in global development governance.

The benefits of the SDGs can sometimes be framed as ‘universal’, but ‘differentiated’ (e.g. Long, 2015). For example, Target 1.3’s commitment to implementing ‘social protection systems and measures for all’ includes the caveat that this be understood as ‘nationally appropriate’ (United Nations, 2015b).⁴ While this might refer to domestic material capacity, it also allows that the scope of who is included in that universal system can be limited on the basis of domestic politics and exclusionary practices (Sengupta, 2016).

The implications of this become clearer if we consider Target 16.9, which commits to the following: ‘[b]‌y 2030, provide legal identity for all, including birth registration’ (United Nations, 2015b). On first glance, this looks like it might support the inclusion of those affected by statelessness, but it is ambiguous. There is no internationally agreed way to recognise legal identity (Dahan and Gelb, 2015; ISI, 2017). The indicator instituted to track progress on this target (Indicator 16.9.1) measures the ‘[p]roportion of children under 5 years of age whose births have been registered with a civil authority, by age’ (United Nations, 2020: 22). However, civil registration is insufficient to allocate either recognition of legal status or access to rights, and it certainly does not equate to citizenship. Registering and identifying a population may help a state to plan school places and health facilities for those that it intends to serve, without benefitting those who are intentionally excluded (Gerber et al., 2011; Dunning et al., 2014: 2; Alexander, this volume).

Indeed, ‘legal identity’ also carries risks for some people. For example, legal identification as a ‘stateless Palestinian’ in Lebanon excludes a person from Lebanese citizenship (Akram, 2002). In Estonia, members of the Russian-speaking minority are given a specific legal identity of non-citizen of Estonia in lieu of citizenship (Vollmer, this volume). Even citizenship status per se may carry risks. The United Arab Emirates (U.A.E.), for example, has created a Comorian minority community by buying Comoros citizenship for those residents excluded from U.A.E. citizenship, producing additional challenges for those affected (Kuzmova, this volume). There is a risk that if the role of citizenship in global development efforts is not addressed explicitly, work to realise Target 16.9 may contribute to, rather than ameliorate, the exclusion of some people entirely.

States are, then, able to restrict who falls within the scope of the SDGs’ targets. In ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• A Stateless Poem
• Introduction: Opening a conversation about statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship
• Part I: Producing and maintaining statelessness
• Part II: Living with the problem of citizenship
• Part III: Rethinking governance
• Index