Teacher	Bart Klem
Room	303
Time	10:15 - 12:00
Slides	For slides click here
Preparation	Please read: Fortin, Katharine (2021) “To be or not to be? Legal Identity in Crisis in Non-International Armed Conflicts”, Human Rights Quarterly, 43: 29–69. International Rescue Committee (2016) Identify Me: The Documentation Crisis in Northern Syria. https://www.rescue-uk.org/sites/default/files/document/1207/identify-me-july-2016-irc.pdf Navaro-Yashin, Yael (2007) “Make-believe papers, legal forms and the counterfeit: Affective interactions between documents and people in Britain and Cyprus”, Anthropological Theory, 7(1): 79–98.

Civilian life goes on at times of war. People get married, children are born, people buy property, they get vaccinations, they die. All of this requires forms of administration, including - the most foundational of all forms of legal registrations - the administration of the very fact that people exist: their legal identity. Every person has a right to legal personhood, to the recognition of their unique individual humanity as a person before the law, no matter whether they live in territories governed by the state, contested areas and territories that are rules by non-state armed actors. If the latter is the case, this often raises complicated questions. What if the non-state armed actor is a guerrilla with very limited capacity (think of some of the groups in Myanmar), what if they are well-organised group that is widely despised (think of Islamic state), what if they are thoroughly established but still not recognised (think of North Cyprus) or they are but not by some key actors (think of Taiwan), or what if they were widely recognised but then demised (think of the Syrian Interim Government). In this wide diversity of cases, pressing questions arise about what shape legal identity take, how are to understand it and - most importantly - how people manage to navigate such a multiplicity of sovereign claimants.

Additional reading/resources (not mandatory)

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

Fortin, Katharine, Bart Klem, and Marika Sosnowski (2021) “Legal identity and rebel governance: A comparative perspective on lived consequence of contested sovereignty”, in T. Bloom and L. N. Kingston (eds) Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship, pp. 125-137. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Ganohariti, Ramesh (2020) “Dual Citizenship in de facto States: Comparative Case Study of Abkhazia and Transnistria”, Nationalities Papers, 48(1): 175–192.

Ganohariti, Ramesh (2021) “Politics of Passportization and Territorial Conflicts” in Richmond and Visoka (eds) The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Peace and Conflict Studies, Living Edition. ttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-11795-5_182-2

Hampton, Kathryn (2019) ‘Born in the Twilight Zone: Birth Registration in Insurgent Areas,’ International Review of the Red Cross, 101 (911).

Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (2019) The World’s Stateless: Deprivation of Nationality. ISI website.

Krasniqi, Gëzim (2019) “Contested States as Liminal Spaces of Citizenship: Comparing Kosovo and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus”, Ethnopolitics, 18(3): 298–314.

Sosnowski, Marika (2020) ‘Citizenship constellations in Syria’, POMEPS Studies 42( November): 68-73.

Wedeen, Lisa (2003) “Seeing like a Citizen, Acting like a State: Exemplary Events in Unified Yemen.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 45: 680–713.