Citizenism as an Ideology of Domination

In the contemporary global context where citizenships are deeply unequal and racialized, the focus on rights invites us to dismiss the baseless presumption that citizenship acquisition is always in the interests of the populations concerned, let alone that it is directly connected to the protection of human and citizenship rights. It is the world’s inequitable neo-feudal citizenism arrangement that is a problem, not the fact that some people do not fit neatly into the citizenism hierarchy and find themselves in a position of statelessness. Shedding light on the role of citizenship and statelessness in the world today as tools of preservation of racialized hierarchies and inequitable exclusion of most of the world’s population from rights at home and abroad, my contribution questions the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’s (UNHCR) mission and actions in this domain and takes issue with the self-serving parochialism of dominant Western citizenship and statelessness literatures. UNHCR work adds weight ot the citizenism ideology, which explains away global inequalities through assigning the populations of formerly colonized spaces to the citizensihp statuses which are 'naturally' third rate, offering liabilities, rather than rights. Citizenism is thus a tool of global racial segregaton and the preservation of the inequitable status quo, where neo-feudal entitlements prevail.