Summary
Citizenship is widely hailed as an unquestionable good. Contradicting such conventional accounts, this paper advances the concept of ‘citizenising violence’: harm produced not by the absence of citizenship, but rather its production and enforcement. Borderlands render this violence particularly visible, not because they are exceptional, but because they foreground citizenship’s governing logics in their most explicit form: such areas reveal how law is partial, membership is plural and protection is conditional. Drawing on cases from Myanmar’s borderlands, and beyond, the paper examines three analytically distinct but interrelated forms of citizenising violence: 1) exclusion; 2) hierarchy; and 3) surveillance and repression. The authors demonstrates that, while international organisations continue to provide financial and technical support for national ID systems and centralised civil registries, the reality is that resources aimed at building the state’s capacity to identify, register and document people also increase the capacity of said state to surveil, repress and exclude.
Main insights
- ‘Citizenising violence’ is a harm produced not by the absence of citizenship, but rather by its production and enforcement. Borderlands render this violence particularly visible because they foreground citizenship’s governing logics in their most explicit form: in such areas, law is partial, membership is plural and protection is conditional.
- ‘Citizenising exclusions’ refers to the formal denial of membership. This withholding or invalidating of citizenship can be actively deployed by states as a technology of rights removal. The Rohingya stand as the starkest example of a citizenised exclusion.
- ‘Citizenising hierarchies’ capture how citizenship operates as a graded form of membership, in which belonging is formally recognised but – in reality – unevenly valued and rights, resources and protections are differentially allocated.
- ‘Citizenising surveillance’ and repression describes how citizenship is operationalised as a regime of political control through identification systems, surveillance technologies, checkpoints and movement restrictions, thereby rendering certain populations suspicious in the eyes of the state.
- Importantly, the above forms of violence are not limited to formal states. Non-state authorities, armed groups and international institutions can also reproduce citizenising violence through governance practices, registration systems, welfare provision and population management.
Policy Implications
- International efforts to expand legal identity systems and civil registration may increase state capacity to identify, document and include people, but they can also increase the capacity to surveil, exclude and repress.
- The international policy landscape is dominated by the principles of identification and enumeration, which are seen as vital for informing programming and evidencing impact. When it comes to delivering welfare, protections and rights, however, such an approach is ineffective. Instead, policy-makers should start asking ‘How do we work with people who are not identified and not counted by states?’ or ‘How do we resource and justify interventions with limited and unverifiable data?’ rather than ‘How do we identify stateless people or undocumented people?’.
- Recognising that violence is generated by the production of citizenship means that humanitarian and human rights programming must take proper account of the perils of international ‘technical expertise’ and resources being provided to states engaged in citizenship related digitisation projects.
- Borderlanders demonstrate that equitable access to security and support does not hinge on the institutions that formalise identity, but on the creative ways people negotiate, resist and reconfigure those systems. Rather than further strengthening global drives for universal identification, international policies concerned with equity should embrace this multiplicity of belongings, identities and identification practices.