State-generated documents provide evidentiary proofs of citizenship, but their role is not always so clear. The very documents that are used to acquire and cement citizenship can also be distributed by states to strategically deny citizenship claims. It is the latter that is the subject of this timely and much-needed contribution.
Noora Lori’s Offshore Citizens investigates the unique case of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) purchase of foreign passports from the poor African island nation of the Union of Comoros in 2008 to distribute as an identity document to its subnational minorities without their consent. Because these passports do not afford rights or protections by either the Union of Comoros or the UAE, this arrangement was seen as a “novel and puzzling” (p. 5) state strategy of denaturalization. The passports allowed federal authorities in Abu Dhabi to effectively convert “domestic minorities” into “foreign residents” without the individuals ever leaving the country. The new passports came with the “specter of deportation” (p. 212), because the recipient was now legally subject to the discretionary power of the state through contingent and revocable residency rights. Moreover, because these 80,000–120,000 long-term minorities did not possess an important citizenship document, the khulāṣat al-qayd or family book, the UAE reclassified them as bidūn (stateless). They were disqualified from Emirati citizenship because their lineage was outside the officially recognized Arab tribes listed in the 1925 British census. This created a “de facto” statelessness (p. 40)—an exclusion that was “short of expulsion” (p. 5).
Based on an extensive archival study of more than 3,200 documents and data from 180 semi-structured in-depth interviews, Lori lays out a richly detailed history and analysis of how this exclusion came to be. She suggests two possible explanations. The first is a larger “national dilemma” that wrestles with the question of who can be a citizen in the UAE. Before 1971, regional immigration flows and intra-emirate elite rivalry led to divergent visions of which Arab tribes constitute authentic nativity to the new federal monarchy. She explains, “The official primordial nationalism seen today with its procedural emphasis on bloodline and allegiance can be traced to this period of intense struggles over categorization” (p. 51). But as the federation developed, these historic rivalries did not dissipate and elite competition over citizenship criteria continued, with Abu Dhabi at the apex of a seven-member Emirati federation. Over time each Emirate subunit was limited in its ability to define the citizenry within its jurisdiction, as naturalization cases approved at the local level were delayed or denied at the federal level where Abu Dhabi called the shots.
A second explanation emphasizes the UAE’s “security dilemma,” its immediate need to upgrade state capacity through a comprehensive surveillance and identification of immigrant and local populations. In the mid-2000s, an internal shift in elite power in Abu Dhabi led to a biometric identity registration campaign to sort “everyone in a category” (p. 218) and to secure the distribution of welfare benefits. Abu Dhabi issued foreign passports to those without family books, thereby formally denying them robust welfare benefits, such as subsidized housing, free health care, free education, and tax exemptions, among others. In 2007, the average male Emirati citizen received benefits estimated at 204,000 dirhams or $55,500 (p. 7n9) annually—a significant amount.
Contributing to both the national and security dilemma is the UAE’s “demographic imbalance” (p. 118): noncitizens form 88.5% of the total population and 92% of the labor force (p. 214). Officially, the permanent settlement of foreign workers is prohibited. But as Lori shows, many of these temporary immigrant workers use formal and informal networks of the kafala system to be “temporary on paper only” (p. 159). A paradox thus emerges in UAE’s citizenship regime: temporary foreign guest workers acquire permanence through the iterative renewal of visas by kin-based networks, even as long-term resident minorities are denaturalized through the state distribution of foreign passports and temporary visas. This is not entirely surprising: rich, ethnically based authoritarian states narrowly circumscribe their demos and routinely limit the distribution of generous welfare benefits.
What is original is Lori’s explanation for how this exclusion is maintained. Building on Elizabeth Cohen’s recent work (The Political Value of Time, 2018), Lori innovatively shows how a state’s strategic use of “time” excludes subnational minorities. The duration of time is applied differentially to varied groups, so that “what matters is not how much time a person has resided in a state for but rather how that time is counted” (pp. 34–35). Time is also used as a “temporal deadline” (in this case 1925) to establish authentic lineages by privileging certain ethnic Arab tribal groups present before the founding of the nation over others (p. 94). Most importantly, Lori shows how the strategic use of time—in the postponement or delay of citizenship decisions—both consolidates state power to maintain “the citizen/noncitizen boundary” (p. 160) and favors institutions with the power to grant citizenship (such as the Ministry of Interior). Consequently, a state’s strategic and exclusionary use of time (and corresponding identity documents) generates varieties of “precarious citizenship,” each bound to a limbo status. Citizenship determinations are persistently put off through postponement, deferral, or delay, so that ambiguity becomes “a goal and end in itself” (p. 213). Waiting for a citizenship decision across generations becomes a type of citizenship status.
Lori’s case study both cautions us on the claims of current citizenship theory and opens avenues for future theory building. First, the unilateral “offshoring of citizenship” points to the increasing conditionality of citizenship and rights as limbo statuses rise within and across states. Her book shows new processes of denationalization and of its subset denaturalization. If domestic status can be “offshored” without consent through the internal distribution of foreign passports, this has serious implications for the stability and sovereignty of citizenship regimes. Second, her analysis is consequential for emerging debates on the strategic use of passports and entrepreneurial citizenship-for-sale schemes. She presents the counterintuitive phenomenon of a rich authoritarian state acquiring passports from a poor African state to legally exclude domestic minorities. But there are trade-offs between states selling citizenship and maintaining sovereign authority over populations. The prospect of document-driven statelessness invites discussion on the utility of passports from underdeveloped countries and their capacity to bear interstate responsibilities. Finally, her book signals the need for more research on the adoption of citizenship policies that appear to be systematized forms of nondecision-making. Tactical delays preempt definitive and concrete resolutions to citizenship claims. Lori’s inductive case study raises questions of just how generalizable her findings are and under what conditions a policy of delays travels to a larger set of cases across state capacity and regime type.
This minor quibble aside, Lori’s book compels us to reflect on the paradox of state-building. The political and economic exclusion of internal minorities was accelerated by a hi-tech state-building initiative and a biometric identity management infrastructure. When individuals do not fit temporally bound, predetermined, and standardized categories of modern state-building, the net result is a more classic form of exclusion—the revocation of status and the denial of a “right to have rights.”
Lori’s original empirical data and innovative concept formation make Offshore Citizens an important and welcome contribution to the burgeoning literature on citizenship and immigration policies in the Global South.
