All Ears to the Ground

Resisting mass citizenship stripping and citizenship violence

Abstract

This article explores ground-level collective modes of resistance that highlight state practices associated with mass citizenship stripping. In doing so, it identifies challenges in anti-statelessness work and suggests that these and other forms of resistance can be important in informing and shaping more responsive international interventions. The study focuses on situations in which state authorities have weaponised their citizenship laws and ID systems to exclude, segregate and expel people based on their membership of a group. Specifically, it focuses on Rohingya, Kurdish and Palestinian experiences of citizenship violence. Through these case studies and broader literature review, it identifies specific modes of citizenship violence within the broader processes of group persecution. It then explores five non-exhaustive modes of collective resistance that have been organised by affected communities. These are: countering re-categorisation through collective refusals; countering document stripping through the collection and exhibition of documents; countering erasure through community-centred knowledge production and arts; countering conflict-associated statelessness through self-registration; and countering conditionalities of IDs through strategic compliance. People affected by statelessness and survivors of state crime are active agents in seeking social justice, despite the structural factors that limit the effectiveness of many forms of resistance. As such, the power dynamics between affected communities, states and international actors are explored to identify the constraints to these modes of resistance. The study concludes by considering some of the implications of these forms of resistance for the international anti-statelessness sector.