When is a citizen stateless? This is not a children’s joke with a clever punchline; living with an entitlement to but without recognition as a citizen is the lived experience of untold numbers of people globally. It is also a matter of scholarly debate: are such individuals, entitled to nationality but unrecognized by their state, stateless? Or are they merely de facto stateless? Some have argued that such individuals are stateless, and that the term de facto statelessness is unhelpful. These scholars can point to the international definition of statelessness as someone ‘not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law.’ The argument goes, if someone is entitled to nationality, but not considered as a national, they are stateless, full stop. Others point to the 1954 Convention’s failure to protect de facto stateless people as proof of its inadequacy to protect people without state protection.
Ghost Citizens joins this conversation, noting Prof. Jamie Chai Yun Liew’s view ‘that the legal fact of being conferred citizenship is important. As such, persons should be considered stateless until they are legally recognized as a citizen.’ But her monograph pushes further, arguing that we must also explore why the state determines who is a citizen to start with. Here, she joins the theoretical contributions arguing that genuine links to a state should establish a stateless person’s claim to citizenship.
Ghost Citizens focuses on the legal system and experiences of stateless people in Malaysia, but the volume understands that its lessons apply more broadly. Liew mentions that many of the book’s lessons would apply in other postcolonial states, and she also sees resonances from Canada, where she practices law. Indeed, the experiences of stateless people that she recounts strongly resemble the experiences of stateless people in the United States, which shares a fractured system with limited protections for stateless people and an emphasis on officials’ discretion.
Liew’s many talents as a lawyer, academic, storyteller, and interviewer are on display in this slim but rich and interdisciplinary book. Rooting the book in her family’s own experiences with statelessness, Liew engages with political and sociolegal theory; analyzes Malaysia’s legal system; and presents the personal experiences of stateless people, lawyers, and NGO representatives based on her ethnographic research.
The strength of this book lies both in its exploration of sociolegal theory as well as its meticulous evidence drawn from legal and ethnographic research with stateless individuals and advocates in Malaysia. Ghost Citizens offers a well-developed case study and provides a model framework for documenting and learning from stateless individuals and advocates. The volume expands the literature about the intersectionality of statelessness with gender discrimination, racial discrimination, and birth registration. It also further develops scholarship on statelessness in situ, offering an important caution against assuming the foreignness of stateless individuals and appropriateness of stateless determination procedures in all situations.
Finally, Liew’s concept of a ‘ghost citizen’ is an important theoretical contribution to the ongoing scholarly conversation on concepts of belonging and the right to nationality. Liew convincingly argues that we ought not to overly trust states, which are the primary obstacles for many stateless people in obtaining recognition as nationals, and that we should seek to move beyond state recognition of citizenship.
While attracted to Ayelet Shachar’s notion of jus nexi, Liew argues that theories of citizenship ought not to be separated from the experiences of stateless people. From her research and discussions with stateless people, she demonstrates that we should value any means by which states will recognize citizenship. She briefly introduces the concept of kinship as a possible basis to expand the concept of jus nexi, though this concept could use further development in future work.
Yet, this brings about a catch-22: Ghost Citizens argues that stateless people in situ ought to be able to gain citizenship based on their deep, social ties rather than through the state – but citizenship without state recognition is, simply stated, statelessness. State recognition as a citizen is essential to a stateless person not because states ought as a normative matter have the prerogative to decide who is a citizen, but because the state also decides who can access government services that make citizenship valuable. States are becoming more, not less, involved in determining who can access necessities like identification, healthcare, and education — and who can avoid criminalization and arbitrary detention.
Ghost Citizen, with its engaging style and insights, leaves one hoping that Liew will further develop the concept of kinship and the tension between social ties and the importance of state recognition in nationality. But Liew need not resolve this paradox; her call for citizenship based on genuine and effective links in no way conflicts with other strategies such as advocating with the state for recognition of individual’s claims to citizenship and pressing for broader inclusion of and access to services for noncitizens.
