Nomadic Peoples and Alternate Conceptions of Place

Under pressure from sedentary majority populations, nomadic peoples face serious threats to their cultural survival and livelihood. Nomadic groups have long faced suspicion and discrimination—as illustrated by the ongoing marginalization of European Roma and Travellers, the Maasai of Tanzania and Kenya, and the Bedouin of the MENA region—and modern societies tend to see human rights, including the basic rights of freedom of movement and property rights, through a lens that privileges settlement. Indeed, nomadic peoples are often viewed with suspicion and excluded from the citizenry because they move “too much” and do not conform to majority views related to settlement, land use, and community membership. This bias leaves nomadic peoples without functioning citizenship in regard to state governments, who fail to understand their basic needs and perspectives. Resulting rights abuses center not only on rights to land and natural resources but also on cultural and political expression.

Actualizing the Ideal of Functioning Citizenship

Guided by the limitations of traditional citizenship, Chapter 9 seeks to move the ideal of functioning citizenship from theory to practice. After we reevaluate how we see the problem, we must then adjust our responses it. This chapter first offers “practical” recommendations for filling protection gaps and alleviating some immediate causes of human suffering. These recommendations include legal, bureaucratic, and policy responses to hierarchies of personhood. While these steps are useful starting points, they are not (and will never be) enough. Instead, actualizing the ideal of functioning citizenship further requires expanding our notion of citizenship to include political space for those who cannot be neatly categorized as citizens or noncitizens. By acknowledging the limitations of our current system—and recognizing the existence of hierarchies of personhood—we can begin the difficult work of broadening political membership and de-linking worthiness from legal status and state recognition.

Second-Class Citizens in the “Land of the Free”

Chapter 7 shifts the discussion to focus specifically on the case study of the United States, where “second-class” citizens are often unable to access fully functioning citizenship and enjoy their rights to place and purpose. Drawing from the work of Margaret Somers, the “contractualization of citizenship” and “color-blind” politics often lead to situations of “internal statelessness” in one of the world’s wealthiest, most powerful countries. Issues of police brutality and inequality before the law arise from pervasive systems of unequal citizenship and structural violence against racial minorities, many of whom occupy lower socioeconomic classes than their White counterparts in American cities such as Detroit, Flint, and Saint Louis. Human rights challenges such as forced eviction, lack of clean drinking water and affordable healthcare, and widespread racial inequalities highlight the ways many people are denied their full rights to place and purpose despite their status as American citizens.

Indigenous Nations and Tribal Sovereignty

The indigenous rights movement has embraced the idea of self-determination for framing their demands for economic, political, and cultural survival. Indeed, calls for tribal sovereignty problematize the international community’s central focus on state governments for legitimizing human rights claimants. For communities such as the Onondaga Nation of Central New York, state membership comes second to the ties that bind one to an indigenous nation. (Indeed, the Onondaga Nation maintains a legally distinct territory just outside Syracuse, New York, and some members have rejected US citizenship in favor of tribe-issued passports.) While this chapter explores the historical trajectory leading to modern indigenous rights concerns—which include an ongoing process of cultural genocide—it focuses on how indigenous nations and tribal sovereignty challenge the reliance on state citizenship for recognizing personhood and claiming human rights. Calls for indigenous sovereignty offer alternative pathways for conceptualizing identification, legal status, and political membership.

Irregular Human Movement and the Creation of Liminal Spaces

Various forms of illicit human movement leave many individuals without functioning citizenship, often because they are outside their country of legal nationality and cannot claim rights for fear of arrest, deportation, or some other form of retribution. These categories of migration include irregular migration—sometimes called “illegal” or “undocumented” migration—as well as those who, often as part of this process, cross borders via human smuggling or trafficking. Here we see definitional lines blurring; there are debates about who counts as a migrant versus a refugee, at what point smuggling becomes trafficking, and so forth. In some cases, lack of functioning citizenship is what necessitates migration in the first place. Yet these forms of illicit movement also create liminal spaces where migrants and trafficking victims exist outside the law, beyond the reach of functioning citizenship where they are dangerously vulnerable to rights abuses.

Forced Displacement and Broken Ties

Although most forcibly displaced persons are legal nationals of a state, they lack functioning citizenship with their governments. In fact, their governments are often responsible for the human rights abuses and conflicts that prompted their displacement to begin with. While some protections under international law are meant to fill the gaps created by these broken ties, in reality the displaced suffer widespread human rights abuses in the absence of a reliable state duty-bearer. Anti–Syrian refugee sentiments in Europe, refugee detention in Australia, and the stubborn refusal to acknowledge many “illegal immigrants” as asylum-seekers in North America are just a few examples of the severe challenges to basic human rights the forcibly displaced face in the absence of functioning citizenship. The inadequacies of refugee rights, including the false assumption that displacement is anything less than normal in our current system, lead to glaring denials of the rights to place and purpose for the displaced.

Statelessness and Elusive Political Membership

Statelessness is recognized not only as a violation of the “right to a nationality” but also as a root cause of additional rights abuses. Yet while legal nationality is an essential prerequisite for the mere possibility of enjoying basic human rights, the international community’s narrow emphasis on citizenship acquisition is misguided. Legal status is only one step in a long journey toward full rights protection; statelessness is both a cause of marginalization and a symptom of it. That is, most stateless populations lack legal nationality because they face systematic discrimination from the beginning. Their circumstances are worsened by statelessness, but legal status alone cannot guarantee full rights protection. Rather than relying on the acquisition of legal nationality to ensure access to human rights, advocates must acknowledge the deeply rooted complexities of statelessness and seek out solutions that guarantee functioning citizenship rather than simple legal status.

The Changing Value and Meaning of Citizenship

Chapter 1 shows how the value and meaning of citizenship have evolved within political thought, with particular attention to the intensification of debates in relation to the protection of modern human rights. With the creation of the United Nations and the adoption of rights norms, the international community made assumptions about identity and membership that effectively limited the inclusiveness of so-called universal rights. By privileging state sovereignty and legal nationality, the human rights regime created protection gaps for noncitizens and people at the margins. Scholars continue to debate whether globalization has eroded the importance of state citizenship and the nation-state, or whether it has in fact strengthened the state’s role in the world system. I argue that citizenship continues to have persistent power and appeal, and that this complex concept is often conversely viewed as a right, an identity, and a commodity.

Introduction

THE PREAMBLE TO THE United Nations’ 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) asserts that “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” (...

Conveying the Problem(s) and Representing Personhood

Chapter 8 explores the international community’s responses to these hierarchies of personhood by considering how violated rights to place and purpose have been communicated and interpreted. Drawing on concepts such as issue emergence, visual narratives, and framing, this chapter assesses the ways that human rights concerns are represented. This assessment is useful for better understanding the ways in which vulnerabilities to human rights abuse are constructed and translated for media consumption, fundraising initiatives, and public advocacy campaigns. At the same time, this analysis also highlights how the problems stemming from lack of functioning citizenship receive vastly different responses depending on political circumstances—including how they align with the hierarchies of personhood that operate at local, state, and international levels. Ultimately, this chapter argues that we must reevaluate the ways that we see problems related to lack of functioning citizenship, which includes facilitating the empowerment and representation of vulnerable communities.