Special Issue on legal identity under insurgencies and unrecognised states (forthcoming in Citizenship Studies)

Abstract

Chair: George Kyris, University of Birmingham Editors: Marika Sosnowski, University of Melbourne Bart Klem, University of Gothenburg With its 11 contributions, the forthcoming special issue of Citizenship Studies, uses political science, international law and anthropology literature to unmoor the primacy of the nation-state as the sole entity able to confer legal identity on individuals. It does this by examining legal identity documents, and their ramifications, in entities that exist physically but do not exist (entirely) legally or politically, what we term aspirant states. We find that doing so highlights that these aspirant states are not a set of problems to be redressed by integrating these anomalous spaces into the international order with better governance or juridical disambiguation. Rather, legal identity documents issued by aspirant states raise more fundamental questions about contemporary citizenship regimes in general and about the way law and state authority are constructed and reproduced. Such arguments force us to contest and reconsider the violent and circular logic of the current nation-state system and how legal identity, and citizenship, is conferred and maintained. Each author will give a 5 minute overview of the issue they cover, followed by a 5 minute Q&A. The presentation line-up of the roundtable is as follows: Introduction to the special issue: ▪️ Bart Klem, University of Gothenburg Inputs on birth registration and death certificates: ▪️ Atharv Dhiman, University of Amsterdam ▪️ Bilyana Petkova Khan, United Nations, Geneva ▪️ Q&A Inputs on Caucasus: ▪️ Gehad Abaza, University of California ▪️ Ramesh Ganohariti, University of Leiden ▪️ Q&A Inputs on Syria: ▪️ Sarah Adamczyk, Norwegian Refugee Council / Jessica Doumit: Norwegian Refugee Council ▪️ Thomas McGee, University of Melbourne ▪️ Will Grant-Brook, Independent researcher ▪️ Q&A