All Ears to the Ground
These actions highlight the human costs associated with the ‘legal identities for
all’ agenda. As such, they challenge the international development sector to: find
ways to identify situations in which registration, census making and other
processes cause harm and adapt approaches accordingly; rethink the role of
identification and enumeration as foundational to the delivery of welfare and
development; and focus not on national statistics for counting and identifying
stateless people, but rather focus on how to effectively deliver development and
humanitarian support to people who are safer when they remain uncounted or
unidentified by the states in which they live.
The second mode of resistance considered how groups collect and exhibit
historic documents to draw attention to state practices of document stripping and
identity erasure. This practice highlights the significance of group identity and
group persecution in exclusionary citizenship regimes. As such, it challenges the
anti-statelessness sector to look beyond initiatives that seek to increase individual
access to civil registration and documentation, and consider how to integrate
anti-statelessness initiatives with those of other sectors working on group
persecution, including international criminal law initiatives and conflictsensitivity and peace-building initiatives. It also challenges those working with
identification registration technologies to consider ways to ensure that digitisation
can give humans more control over their data and identities vis-à-vis states.
The third mode of resistance focused on community-centred knowledge
production to counter state discourses that diminish or erase their histories and
identities. This challenges the anti-statelessness sector to centre the knowledge
and analysis of people affected by statelessness at the same time as decolonising
its own knowledge production practices and approaches to international policy. It
asks the sector to fund and amplify local research initiatives and arts platforms,
whilst at the same time taking steps to reduce the dominance of their own
expertise. This challenge remains despite the existing efforts within the sector to
level the playing field and to actively create spaces for people affected by
statelessness.
The fourth mode of resistance focused on countering statelessness through
self-registration. This action exposes the problems and gaps associated with state
legitimacy being tied so closely to documentation and legal identities. It
challenges scholars and policy actors to reach beyond the methodological
nationalism inherent in our work. It asks the sector to find ways to look beyond
the state in supporting local forms of registration and identity recognition, as well
as promoting international recognition of a broader range of documents including
reciprocity of recognition of those issued by autonomous administrations and
non-recognised states. It asks other states receiving refugees and migrants to
reduce the burdens of documentation, and to build escape lanes for the stateless
off the super-highway of the ‘legal identities for all’ agenda.
The fifth mode of resistance underlines how not all forms of citizenship
violence can be addressed through campaigns to end statelessness. Statelessness
is one outcome of citizenship violence; there are many others, including the
weaponisation of citizenship regimes and ID systems. Understanding responses
on the ground as strategic compliance or subversion points to the urgent need to
address citizenship violence in more holistic ways, by analysing the vast
battlefields of citizenship violence that stretch far beyond statelessness.
All these challenges are, of course, not easily addressed. Not least because they sit
within a much broader set of unequal power relations between states, humans and
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