JOURNAL OF ETHNIC AND MIGRATION STUDIES 4791 South divide by focusing on southern sites to reflect on these global concerns. Global South is not merely a place where global concepts like citizenship, democracy and the rule of law unravel. It is where these concepts get constituted, embodied and concretised as global concepts, with their meanings, limitations and potentialities revealed. The emphasis of theory building from sites in the Global South resonates with Chen’s (2010) advocacy of ‘Asia as method’ to ‘multiply frames of reference in our subjectivity and worldview’. Chen’s argument is for plurality of perspectives and sites of analyses, and to decolonialise our methods and decentre the West as the primary source of universal problematics, models and explanation. In its focus on South and Southeast Asian region, the special issue does not treat the Western experience as paradigmatic, or the non-Western experience as an incomplete work-in-progress. Both experiences are expressions of a shared globality and equally pertinent to study universal phenomena. The special issue, thus, is animated by the desire not merely to theorise citizenship, democracy and the rule of law in the Global South, but theorise the global predicaments of these concepts drawing from the Global South. This is why several dynamics we develop engage with and illuminate the crises in the Global North, whether the crisis of alienage and noncitizenship (Bosniak 2006), racialisation of minorities and the weakening of citizenship stability (Nyers 2018), use and abuse of law (Abel 2018) and democratic decline (Scheppele 2018). In this spirit, the contributions do not conceive of their empirical sites as characterised by a lack, of capacity or substance. Scholarship on citizenship, for instance, even when claiming to be written against the grain tends to treat non-western contexts as sites of lack, characterised by incapacities and divergences from the universal, explicitly or implicitly assumed to be Global North (e.g. Sadiq 2008). This special issue does not treat the Global South to be in the ‘waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty 2000), where they will eventually catch up, so to say, with how citizenship, democracy and the law are meant to be done – as done in the Global North. Rather, the special issue’s approach is animated by Jean and John Camoroff’s (2012) suggestion of thinking about the Global South as a harbinger. As the Comaroffs note, Global North looks increasingly like the Global South in terms of social diversity and cleavages, pluralism and tension, and political dynamics and crises. While previously obscured (though not absent), these dynamics are today more easily visible in the Global North. Regions in the Global South, like South or Southeast Asia, are seen to be states in the making, especially because of their porous border, populations and political understandings. These porosities are increasingly becoming the characteristic of the Global North because of immigration in the historical context of imperialism and colonialisation, neo-liberal dispossession, and visible racialised and graded citizenship. This special issue’s accounts of the ‘mutual attrition’, unsurprisingly then, directly informs how we think about developments at the very heart of the Global North, whether the denationalisation campaigns under Donald Trump in the United States or the Windrush scandal in the United Kingdom. Just as in the South, citizenship in the North is revealing itself not as a stable or unquestioned political fact, but a contested notion that can be and is politically instrumentalised. In the words of the Comaroffs (2012), ‘there is much south in the north, much north in the south, and more of both to come in the future’.