This book seeks to explore the multiplicity of memories and experiences of belonging and exclusion in a range of societies that have been marked by displacement. The volume draws from the wide fields of literature, humanities, and social sciences to reflect on the questions of displacement and citizenship from different vantage points.

Transnational migration studies tend to conceptualize a clear spatial distinction between refugee camps and their surroundings as "spaces of the displaced" and "spaces of the citizen" respectively. However, the geography of memory, when seen through the prism of a space-state-citizenship relationship, is much more complicated and difficult to disentangle. Only when examining cultural preservation of memories of displacement can we shed light on these complex connections. Memory, Conflicts, Disasters, and the Geopolitics of the Displaced is a collection of innovative research that examines the preservation of socio-cultural memory in the wake of disaster and violence. Featuring coverage of a broad range of topics including conscription, refugee culture, and climate change, this book is ideally designed for human rights workers, activists, historians, policymakers, government officials, researchers, academicians, and students in the fields of sociology, anthropology, geography, politics, and urban planning.

Deportation has again taken a prominent place within the immigration policies of nation-states. Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation addresses the social responses to deportation, in particular the growing movements against deportation and detention, and for freedom of movement and the regularization of status. The book brings deportation and anti-deportation together with the aim of understanding the political subjects that emerge in this contested field of governance and control, freedom and struggle. However, rather than focusing on the typical subjects of removal – refugees, the undocumented, and irregular migrants – Irregular Citizenship, Immigration, and Deportation looks at the ways that citizens get caught up in the deportation apparatus and must struggle to remain in or return to their country of citizenship. The transformation of ‘regular’ citizens into deportable ‘irregular’ citizens involves the removal of the rights, duties, and obligations of citizenship. This includes unmaking citizenship through official revocation or denationalization, as well as through informal, extra-legal, and unofficial means. The book features stories about struggles over removal and return, deportation and repatriation, rescue and abandonment. The book features eleven ‘acts of citizenship’ that occur in the context of deportation and anti-deportation, arguing that these struggles for rights, recognition, and return are fundamentally struggles over political subjectivity – of citizenship. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of citizenship, migration and security studies.

A multiethnic study of how race, gender, and citizenship affected major twentieth-century internal migrations in U.S. history and narrative.

Based on rich oral histories, this is an engaging study of citizenship construction and practice in Liberia, Africa's first black republic.

In Varieties of Sovereignty and Citizenship, scholars from a wide range of disciplines reflect on the transformation of the world away from the absolute sovereignty of independent nation-states and on the proliferation of varieties of plural citizenship. The emergence of possible new forms of allegiance and their effect on citizens and on political processes underlie the essays in this volume. The essays reflect widespread acceptance that we cannot grasp either the empirical realities or the important normative issues today by focusing only on sovereign states and their actions, interests, and aspirations. All the contributors accept that we need to take into account a great variety of globalizing forces, but they draw very different conclusions about those realities. For some, the challenges to the sovereignty of nation-states are on the whole to be regretted and resisted. These transformations are seen as endangering both state capacity and state willingness to promote stability and security internationally. Moreover, they worry that declining senses of national solidarity may lead to cutbacks in the social support systems many states provide to all those who reside legally within their national borders. Others view the system of sovereign nation-states as the aspiration of a particular historical epoch that always involved substantial problems and that is now appropriately giving way to new, more globally beneficial forms of political association. Some contributors to this volume display little sympathy for the claims on behalf of sovereign states, though they are just as wary of emerging forms of cosmopolitanism, which may perpetuate older practices of economic exploitation, displacement of indigenous communities, and military technologies of domination. Collectively, the contributors to this volume require us to rethink deeply entrenched assumptions about what varieties of sovereignty and citizenship are politically possible and desirable today, and they provide illuminating insights into the alternative directions we might choose to pursue.

What does it mean to be a citizen? In depth research with a stateless population in Bangladesh has revealed that, despite liberal theory’s reductive vision, the limits of political community are not set in stone. The Urdu-speaking population in Bangladesh exemplify some of the key problems facing uprooted populations and their experience provides insights into the long term unintended consequences of major historical events. Set in a site of camp and non-camp based displacement, it illustrates the nuances of political identity and lived spaces of statelessness that Western political theory has too long hidden from view. Using Bangladesh as a case study, Statelessness and Citizenship: Camps and the creation of political space argues that the crude binary oppositions of statelessness and citizenship are no longer relevant. Access to and understandings of citizenship are not just jurally but socially, spatially and temporally produced. Unpicking Agamben’s distinction between ‘political beings’ and ‘bare life’, the book considers experiences of citizenship through the camp as a social form. The camps of Bangladesh do not function as bounded physical or conceptual spaces in which denationalized groups are altogether divorced from the polity. Instead, citizenship is claimed at the level of everyday life, as the moments in which formal status is transgressed. Moreover, once in possession of ‘formal status’ internal borders within the nation-state render ‘rights-bearing citizens’ effectively ‘stateless’, and the experience of ‘citizens’ is very often equally uneven. While ‘statelessness’ may function as a cold instrument of exclusion, certainly, it is neither fixed nor static; just as citizenship is neither as stable nor benign as the dichotomy would suggest. Using these insights, the book develops the concept of ‘political space’ – an analysis of the way history and space inform the identities and political subjectivity available to people. In doing so, it provides an analytic approach of relevance to wider problems of displacement, citizenship and ethnic relations. Shortlisted for this year’s BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.