2 Noncitizenism ‘Noncitizenism’ refers to the move away from what we can call ‘methodological citizenism’, and towards a theory that recognises the noncitizen relationship. For the most part the story told in liberal political theory is the story of citizens, or people insofar as they relate as citizens. Noncitizens have always been there in the background. This is because the creative process that gives us the State and citizenship also produces noncitizenship. Today, some noncitizens are on the territory of the States with which they have noncitizen relationships, while others are found at their borders or in lands far away. In order to examine the nature of the relationships such individuals have with those States, we need to look for their commonalities. Left unacknowledged, noncitizenship today can make individuals destitute,1 detained,2 and even left to die3 with impunity in and by States ostensibly built on liberal democratic principles. The failure to acknowledge noncitizenship makes people seem rightsless,4 excludable, and 1 Prevented from working and unable to claim State welfare, refused asylum seekers in the UK may be left destitute; see Tendayi Bloom (2015) ‘London’s role in the policy of destitution of asylum seekers: The “Ghosts” in the British migration infrastructure’, in Anne Kershen (ed) (2015) London The Promised Land Revisited, Ashgate. 2 Again, this can be seen most easily in the migratory context. In the US, women and children from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala who have been apprehended at the US-Mexico border are put immediately into, and often kept indefinitely in, administrative detention. Given the acknowledgement that these persons have been, for the most part, fleeing violence and cannot be deported, this detention often lacks a defined end point. For example, Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (2015) ‘Human Rights Situation of Refugees and Migrant Families and Unaccompanied Children in the United States of America’, Organisation of American States OAS/ Ser.L/V/II.155 16 24 July 2015. 3 This phrasing comes again from the migration context, from that of the ‘Left-to-Die boat’, see for example Efthymios Papastavridis (2013) ‘The “Left-to-Die Boat” incident of March 2011: Questions of International Responsibility Arising From the Failures to Save Refugees at Sea’, Refugee Law Initiative Working paper No. 10, School of Advanced Study, London. See also Tara Brian and Frank Laczko (eds) (2014) Fatal Journeys: Tracking Lives Lost During Migration, IOM. 4 Some people’s recognised relationships of citizenship are undone in order to make them deportable. The most extreme example of this in recent years has been the mass denationalisation of Dominican Republic citizens identified as being of Haitian descent, making thousands of those who used to have formal citizenship stateless. See for example, Jillian Blake (2017) ‘Race-based Statelessness in the Dominican Republic’, pp. 102–116 in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds) (2017) Understanding Statelessness, Routledge.