One which ­attempts to grapple with these broader questions. Femin­ ist ­writings in particular have pointed out that the concept of citizenship should move beyond the lawyer’s link between individual and state to encompass ideas of individual autonomy and freedom to engage on a basis of equality in all aspects of public and private life. Notions of belonging and the right (or lack of it) to make claims on any particular community go far beyond the strictly legal or official, and operate at local and regional as well as national levels, and in terms of larger units as well. Individuals can have claims akin to what lawyers call citizenship on other entities, whether town or region or, in Africa in particular, on the structures of governance that operate at the level of ethnic group. Individuals and communities at the margins of African states may find these structures far more important – for good or ill – than the state itself. In African countries where the state is weakest, or most predatory, the idea of national citizenship may be irrelevant to most people most of the time. Yet this book argues that a denial of the right to citizenship itself under national law is often central to the denial of other rights; and not only because of the symbolic value of the law in establishing public discourse. Ethnic and gender discrimination in citizenship law may exclude those affected not only from the right to vote and hold public office, but also from the right to access education, health and other goods, as well as from the right to freedom of movement. They have effects far beyond the question of individual legal status. These effects are felt even in those states that have abandoned their supposed role of physical and social protection and even when the supposedly more powerful are targeted. The allegations in North Kivu that the Banyarwanda are not ‘really’ Congolese, the insistence of President Mugabe that white Zimbabweans are ‘really’ tools for the recolonization of the country by the British, or the denial of citizenship to ‘Lebanese’ Sierra Leoneans have their power because they are based in resentment of past and present control over land and other economic resources. But the impact of the citizenship law discrimination is just as real and 22