(Un)Credible citizen: citizenship dispossession, documents and the politics of the rule of law

This article explores how states mobilise ideologies of the rule of law to legitimise, facilitate and obscure human rights violations, especially in the context of citizenship and migration. There is a global pattern of states using ostensibly legal means to undermine citizenship status of vulnerabl...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of ethnic and migration studies 2024-11, Vol.50 (19), p.4867-4890
Main Author: Bhat, Mohsin Alam
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Administrators
Bureaucracy
Citizenship
Complicity
Corruption
Deprivation
Documents
Human rights
Human rights violations
Identification documents
Identity
Immigration
judicial politics
Law
Legal identity
Migration
Minority groups
Politics
precarious citizenship
Rule of law
Rules
the rule of law
Violations
Citations: Items that this one cites
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Summary:This article explores how states mobilise ideologies of the rule of law to legitimise, facilitate and obscure human rights violations, especially in the context of citizenship and migration. There is a global pattern of states using ostensibly legal means to undermine citizenship status of vulnerable minorities. In several national contexts, the invocation of the rule of law and the use of legal identity documents are interlocked. States have relied on the regimes of documentary citizenship as the legal face of citizenship deprivation. This article studies India's north-eastern state of Assam - one of the most striking instances of this pattern - where bureaucratic practices of citizenship adjudication have threatened the citizenship status of more than 3 million people. It shows that despite being centred around them, the administrators of documentary citizenship routinely disregard identity documents in their everyday functioning. It argues that India's ethnicised politics towards immigration constitutes contradictory attitudes towards identity documents. Officials imagine legal identity documents as legitimate and viable, and simultaneously compromised due to administrative corruption and complicity. This documentary doublethink engenders grave instability of citizenship status. The article illuminates how the rule of law - like the documentary regimes it sustains - is Janus-faced by producing and obscuring precarious citizenship.
ISSN:1369-183X
1469-9451
DOI:10.1080/1369183X.2024.2376412