‘the right to have rights,’ despite the conventional wisdom. In many situations, only personhood is required” (2006, 117). Jean Cohen likewise declares that “many rights that used to be construed exclusively as the rights of citizens are now deemed the rights of persons that must be respected everywhere” (1999, 258). Yishai Blank similarly observes how states are granting “an impressive and ever-growing catalogue of social and economic rights, as well as various political rights” to noncitizens (2007, 438). He further contends that states are “moving in the direction of granting de facto citizenship, that is, the substantive content of citizenship (often devoid of the political rights)” to those who hold no citizenship from anywhere—the stateless (438).
Beside examining the human rights regime’s impact on the citizen-state relationship, other scholars have taken another Limits of Citizenship approach, focusing on “the emergence of membership that is multiple in the sense of spanning local, regional, and global identities, and which accommodates intersecting complexes of rights, duties, and loyalties” (Soysal 1994, 166). Thus while Arendt focused on formal membership in the state, these scholars study the diverse citizenship types or ways of belonging that exist in the contemporary era: from cultural (Kymlicka 1995), transnational (Bauböck 2007), deterritorialized (Ferme 2004; Teune 2009), denationalized (Sassen 2006), documentary (Sadiq 2009), flexible (Ong 1999; Nyamnjoh 2007), (Kostakopoulou 2008), postnational (Soysal 1994; Benhabib and Resnik 2009), post-sovereign (Murphy and Harty 2003), and global (Cabrera 2010) to irregular (Nyers 2011; Ni Mhurchú 2015), quasi (Gilbertson 2006), the “citizenship of aliens” (Bosniak 2006) and “citizenship light” (Caglar 2004). In so doing, they illustrate—contra Arendt—that formal, legal citizenship is no longer so important to act in a polity.
These works tend to directly or indirectly portray formal citizenship in the state as a “waning,” “partially obsolete,” “anachronistic,” “possibly changed institution” or one that is undergoing “crisis” (Benhabib, Shapiro, and Petranovic 2007, 14; Hailbronner 2003, 75; Cohen 1999, 247; Sassen 2006, 280; Benhabib 2004b, 143; McNevin 2011, 143).17 They question whether “the idea of territorial state citizenship—as distinct from personhood—remain[s] important?” and whether “human rights [are] replacing citizenship as the most important rights-bearing ideas and legal norms?” (Jackson 2009, 443).
Using the statelessness as forced displacement in situ framework, however, I find that the postnational portrayal of a world of blurred boundaries, flexible memberships, and denationalized rights is not global in scope.18 The boundaries of belonging are hardening against the racial, ethnic, or religious Other and citizenship remains a crucial status to hold to access rights, freedoms, and protections. Moreover, the postnational worldview that democracies are providers of rights based upon personhood, as opposed to citizenship, also needs to be qualified.
Challenging the Postnational Worldview
The majority of postnational-oriented scholarship is limited in two primary ways: first, by its focus on developed world democracies and their provision of rights and protections to noncitizens19 and, second, by its examination of noncitizens who are not stateless when making claims about the decoupling of human rights from citizenship. With regard to the first limitation, very few works have examined the relationship between citizenship status and access to rights, freedoms, and protections in developing world democracies.20 This is somewhat surprising given that Soysal clearly states that her postnational arguments “are not exclusive to Europe. As the transnational norms and discourse of human rights permeate the boundaries of nation-states, the postnational model is activated and approximated world-wide” (1994, 156).
More recently, Bosniak asserts that “the status of aliens in liberal democratic societies is, in many respects, hardly distinguishable from that of citizens” (2006, 34) as “a great many of the rights commonly associated with equal citizenship and economic citizenship are not confined to status citizens at all but are available to territorially present persons” in “most other liberal democratic states” (117).21 Such a position is in line with the accepted truism that democracies promote and protect human rights.22 As Russell Bova notes,
democracy is presumed to foster basic human liberties and freedoms to a degree that is unmatched by authoritarian regimes.… It is, in fact, this connection between democracy, on the one hand, and human rights and liberties, on the other, that constitutes the most powerful argument in favor of democratic government. (2001, 63)
This selection bias toward developed world democracies within the postnational literature results in an overly optimistic assessment of the degree to which citizenship is no longer important to access rights, freedoms, and protections in the contemporary era. It also obfuscates the myriad ways in which democratic regimes can engage in forced displacement within their own borders under nonconflict and noncrisis conditions against the racial, ethnic, or religious Other. I therefore examine the relationship between citizenship, human rights, and the state within developing world democracies to see if postnational claims about the severance of human rights from citizenship are generalizable to the developing world.
As regards the second limitation, I contend that we must examine whether citizenship has lost its significance as the conveyor of rights, freedoms, and protections by choosing as subjects those who are noncitizens everywhere—the stateless. Despite the increased attention that has been given to noncitizens in recent migratory, citizenship, and human rights research, as well as in political theory, scant consideration has been given to the stateless who represent the epitome of what it means to be a noncitizen. The stateless are distinct from refugees, the undocumented, guest workers and their descendants, and other types of noncitizens who may be noncitizens in their country of residence or employment, but who are not necessarily stateless as they have a “country of origin” and are still recognized as citizens under the operation of some state’s law.
Also, unlike the former groups, who in most instances are migrants of one type or another, stateless people are “noncitizen insiders” (Belton 2011). They are insiders because they have not migrated from elsewhere. They are “rooted” as they remain, for the most part, in the states where they were born.23 They are noncitizens, however, because the state where they were born either rejects them as members or does not fully provide the means by which they can be prevented from falling into statelessness. In both instances, they are forced into liminality and unable to enjoy many of the rights that immigrant noncitizens enjoy because they are not always considered legal or “lawful” residents of the states within which they reside. Moreover, unlike those deemed “unlawful” immigrants, the stateless cannot easily be deported because they do not always have a country of their “own” to which to be returned.24 Indefinite detention is thus often a real possibility (Perks and de Chickera 2009, 49).
It bears mentioning that the stateless are also distinct from refugees. Refugees are sometimes considered de facto stateless because they do not enjoy the protection of their state of citizenship or few (if any) of the rights and freedoms associated with that state’s citizenship. They are defined as persons who have a well-founded fear of persecution in their countries of citizenship because of certain political beliefs that they hold or ascriptive criteria (UN 1951). They consequently flee across an international border in order to seek safety from such persecution.25 Refugees are still typically recognized as nationals under the operation of a given state’s laws, however, and they are not penalized for their “irregular” presence in the same way that stateless people can be. The Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, for example, asks states parties to
not impose penalties, on account of their illegal entry or presence, on refugees who, coming directly from a territory where their life or freedom was threatened in the sense of Article 1, enter or are present in their territory without authorization, provided they present themselves without delay to the authorities and show good cause for their illegal entry or presence. (UN 1951, Article 31)
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