carved into states. It asks us to examine our taken for granted assumption that we all seamlessly fall into place as citizens of one state or another and that we are able to retain the citizenship we acquired at birth throughout our life. Millions of people around the world have no citizenship. They do not formally belong anywhere.
Take a moment and imagine what it must be like not to exist in the eyes of a state’s bureaucratic machinery, not to be protected by national laws, not to have access to—or the ability to exercise—the rights and freedoms that are bound up with a particular state’s citizenship. What must it be like to be physically present, to have tried to make a life in a place, yet to be rejected by the place you consider home? What must it be like to see others, born in the same place that you were, growing up in the same place that you did, be self-determining agents and take advantage of opportunities that come their way because they happen to have citizenship—a status that they hold through no merit or action on their part?
In essence, what is it like to be a noncitizen insider? To be displaced from belonging, even as your roots lie within the same land as the “citizens”?
* * *
I make no pretense to neutrality in this book: I believe that everyone has the right to belong to the community of her or his birth. I believe that the current international system of states that generates and perpetuates statelessness is unjust and I believe that the need to resolve statelessness is one of the greatest tasks and duties that we have in the twenty-first century. Before trying to convince the reader of these positions, however, it is important in a book about belonging and place identity to situate myself in this research project and note my particular subjectivities at the outset. As Ruth Arber reminds us, “We construct ourselves through the other and yet leave that which is ourselves silent” (2010, 57). “We must [therefore] properly define the place from which we speak, the person we are, and the way we might affect, or be affected by, the interpretations inscribed within ethnographic texts” (46).
My “place identity” is shaped by the fact that I consider myself a person who is always coming from elsewhere. I am the “Other” nearly everywhere I have lived (and I have lived in many places). I hold two citizenships, but neither is from the country that I was born in. I was born in a colony that had no citizenship of its own to grant, but I was able to acquire the citizenship of my father’s country. If I had not been able to do so, I could have been stateless. I was born to a Bahamian mother and Bahamian women do not, as I explain in this book, have the same right to pass on their nationality to their children as their male counterparts do. Akin to the Bahamian-born persons of Haitian descent that I interviewed for this study then, I am a Bahamian via “registration.”
Although I identify as Bahamian, I am acutely aware that possessing Bahamian citizenship formalizes my membership, but does not actually make me belong in the eyes of many Bahamians. My skin color, place of birth, and heritage single me out as not really belonging, as coming from somewhere else. I thus have a personal interest in how state membership practices—and society’s acceptance of the “Other”—affect one’s ability to belong and the ways that we can go about ameliorating exclusionary membership practices, especially among those who hold no citizenship from anywhere.
PART I
Reconsidering Forced Displacement
CHAPTER 1
Displaced in Place
Something much more fundamental than freedom and justice … is at stake when belonging to the community into which one is born is no longer a matter of course and not belonging no longer a matter of choice.
—Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
The sun is shining warmly as the ocean breeze gently moves among the pine trees. We have been sitting here a while, our only company a lone crab scavenging for food at the water’s edge. “She had just graduated out of high school,” says Luzena Dumercy, looking out to sea. “She graduated that Friday and that Sunday she left on the boat.”1 The young woman to whom Dumercy refers never came back. She was one of at least eleven people who drowned in Bahamian waters on June 11, 2012, attempting to make it somewhere else.2 “You have to understand why we get to that point to begin with,” continues Dumercy. “They don’t want us here. They don’t make us feel like we belong.… Why would you stay somewhere you’re not wanted?”
Although we are discussing why some people of Haitian descent undertake the perilous sea voyage to leave their Bahamian home, Dumercy’s story is a local echo of a global phenomenon—the widespread movement of people from one place to another in the contemporary era. According to the United Nations (UN), over two hundred million people are on the move globally (UN DESA 2016, 1 and 5). Of these, more than nineteen million are refugees (1 and 9). Whether people are fleeing conflict or persecution, seeking better economic opportunities, or attempting to reunite with family members, the recent images of bodies washing up on Mediterranean shores, of people scaling seemingly impenetrable fences in places like Ceuta and Melilla, and of individuals running across weakly managed borders, add flesh, if not individual stories, to these statistics. What distinguishes the people in Dumercy’s account from many other migrants, however, is that they are driven to leave their home not because of conflict, crisis, or persecution, or because they are trying to escape from an autocratic, failing, or failed state. Instead, they are trying, in Dumercy’s words, “to flee” because they feel as if they do not belong. “They want to leave this place because it’s toxic sometimes,” Dumercy explains. “You shouldn’t be stateless in the place [where] you were born and where you feel like you’re not included or not wanted.”
This book examines the situation of those who are excluded from formal belonging by practices of citizenship deprivation and denial in the countries of their birth. Unlike the majority of forced migrants and other people on the move, these individuals are not recognized as nationals3 by any state under the operation of its law (UN 1954). They are stateless. Statelessness affects more than ten million people worldwide (UNHCR 2015e).4 Without any formal bond of citizenship, stateless people are susceptible to an array of human rights violations, social exclusion, and pervasive insecurity, among other concerns.
While their plight can be just as troubling as that suffered by refugees, internally displaced persons (IDPs) and other forced migrants, stateless people are rarely forced to flee their homes, whether within a state as IDPs or across state borders as refugees.5 They are consequently not considered forcibly displaced persons. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the body mandated with the protection of refugees and stateless people globally, for instance, remarks that a “staggering crisis” faces the world as nearly sixty million people are forcibly displaced (Murray 2015, n. pag.); but it does not include the stateless within this figure because “being stateless doesn’t necessarily correlate to being displaced” (UNHCR 2014f). In this book, I challenge this position.
Whereas Hannah Arendt, one of the twentieth century’s great political theorists, lamented that the stateless were referred to as “‘displaced persons’ … for the express purpose of liquidating statelessness once and for all by ignoring its existence” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 355), I contend that we must reconceptualize statelessness as a form of forced displacement precisely to understand and address this extreme form of noncitizenship. By reconceptualizing statelessness as a form of forced displacement in situ—that is, one does not have to be physically pushed across borders or made to flee one’s home within a state due to conflict, crisis, or persecution to be forcibly displaced—I demonstrate how states can engage
