Teacher	Bart Klem
Room	303
Time	10:15 - 12:00
Slides	Click here for slides
Preparation	Please read: Arendt, Hannah (1962 [1951]) The Origins of Totalitarianism. Cleveland: World Publishing Company. Chapter 9, pp. 267-302. Cooper, Frederick (2018) Citizenship, Inequality and Difference: Historical Perspectives. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Introduction, pp. 1-26.

Hannah Arendt famously described legal identity in relation to citizenship, as the right to have rights. Today, legal identity forms the bedrock of the Universal Human Rights Framework as well as the Sustainable Development Goals. Every human being has the right to registered at birth and to have state documented proof of his/her existence as a legal person. But what exactly is legal identity? How does it differ and overlap with citizenship and nationality? Is it a notion or a material document, and if it is both how do the two connect?

Additional reading/resources (not mandatory)

Bauböck, Rainer (2010) “Studying Citizenship Constellations,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 36(5): 847–859.

Bloom, Tendayi and Lindsey N. Kingston (eds)(2021) Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Breckenridge, Keith and Simon Szreter (eds)(2012) Recognition and registration: The infrastructure of personhood in world history. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Cabot, Heath (2012) “The Governance of Things: Documenting Limbo in the Greek Asylum Procedure”, Polar, Political and Legal Anthropology Review, 35(1): 11–29.

Cabot, Heath (2019) “The European Refugee Crisis and Humanitarian Citizenship in Greece”, Ethnos, 84(5): 747–771.

Caplan, Jane and John Torpey (eds) (2001) Documenting individual identity: The development of state practices in the modern world. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Dehm, Sara (2018) “The Passport”, in Jessie Hohmann and Daniel Joyce (eds) International Law's Objects, pp. 342-356. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kelly Tobias (2006) “Documented Lives: Fear and the Uncertainties of Law during the Second Palestinian Intifada.” Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 12: 89–107.

Manby, Bronwyn (2021) “The Sustainable Development Goals and ‘legal identity for all’: ‘First, do no harm’”, World Development, 139: 105343.

Mongia, Radhika (1999) “Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport”, Public Culture 11(3): 527–556.

Sperfeldt, Christoph (2021) “Legal identity in the sustainable development agenda: Actors, perspectives and trends in an emerging field of research”, The International Journal of Human Rights, DOI: 10.1080/13642987.2021.1913409.

Torpey, John (2000) The invention of the passport: Surveillance, citizenship and the state. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.