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Ghost Citizens

Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law

Jamie Chai Yun Liew author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Fernwood Publishing Co Ltd

Published:22nd Mar '24

Should be back in stock very soon

Ghost Citizens cover

Ghost Citizens is about in situ stateless people, persons who live in a country they consider their own but which does not recognize them as citizens. Liew develops the concept of the "ghost citizen" to understand a global experience and a double oppression: of being invisible and feared in law. The term also refers to two troubling state practices: ghosting their own citizens and conferring ghost citizenship (casting persons as foreigners without legal proof). Told through an examination of law, legal processes and interviews with stateless persons and their advocates, this deeply researched book examines international and domestic jurisprudence as well as administrative decision making to show an emerging practice where states are pointing to a mother figure, constructed in law as racialized, foreign and potentially disloyal, to depict persons as not kin and therefore the responsibility of other states. By tracing British colonial legal vestiges in the case study of Malaysia, Liew shows how contemporary post-colonial, democratic and multi-juridical states deploy law and its processes and historical ideas of racial categories to create and maintain statelessness. This book challenges established norms of state recognition and calls for a discussion of ideas borrowed from other areas of law, including Indigenous legal traditions and family law, on how we should organize our communities with more respectful relations and treatment among kin.

Liew's book is an eloquent exposition of the multitude of mundane, erratic and inconsistent state and non-state actions, and executive, judicial and administrative efforts that undermine citizenship recognition...Ghost Citizens is indispensable reading in a world where rights and benefits continue to require a full and recognized citizenship status and where so many persons of the 'wrong' face and race are positioned by law and practice in a rightless purgatory.--Daiva Stasiulis, Chancellor's Professor Emerita of Sociology, Carleton University

ISBN: 9781773636665

Dimensions: 23mm x 15mm x 1mm

Weight: unknown

224 pages