6 Introduction realities and the theories of colonisation and slavery, for example. Examining these roots is crucial to understanding and addressing the blind spots in liberal ism today, and will be the focus of Chapter 3. As with citizenship, an individual might well be pretty much unaware of her/is noncitizen relationship with a State. As will be shown in Chapter 8, this relationship can be ‘activated’ when a person is made to feel particularly vulnerable – and this vulnerability is challenging both to the individual and to the State. Activated noncit izenship can challenge the legitimacy of a State built upon liberal democratic prin ciples. It can also be practically challenging to the State’s functioning. It can even represent an existential challenge to a liberal State. The way this plays out is best seen at the extremities. From one side, there are irregular migrants and stateless persons as presented in Chapter 4. This includes people who are physically present within a State that denies a relationship with them and obligations towards them. Coming from the other direction, situations of colonisation give rise to unwanted and ambivalent citizenship, and poverty and discrimination mean that formal cit izenship can be unfulfilled. The individuals involved across these situations are not only not acting as citizens. They can be seen to be in positive relationships with States. ‘Noncitizenship’ gives us a way in which to examine the form of that rela tionship, not as an absence, but as an individual-State relationship in its own right. Noncitizens, then, have claims upon States, qua noncitizens. The obligations generated by activated noncitizenship can be understood through the tool of ‘dynamic capabilities’. The framework of ‘dynamic capabilities’ uses the core notion of capabilities developed by Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen, that what is important is what a person can do and be.17 The notion of ‘capabilities’ is co-opted in this book in order to identify the sorts of claims arising from noncitizen-vulnerability. It will not be possible to delineate a universal list of obligations or claims for all people in all contexts for all time. Instead, a dynamic approach can take into account the changing nature of individuals’ capabilities and associated needs, the States and societies that may or may not facilitate them, and crucially, the role of the actors involved in framing the context within which this takes place. But the idea of ‘dynamic capabilities’ goes further than this. It also includes an examination of how the individual and the State can be part of crafting the context within which capabilities can be realised. Locating noncitizenship within liberalism Given liberalism is such a broad church (and note, ‘liberal’ here refers to the philosophical tradition rather than colloquial or party-political uses of the term), it is worth sketching briefly what it means here. Individualism, equality, and liberty are core elements of liberalism. I include also solidarity which, though 17 Note, for example, Martha Nussbaum and Amartya Sen (1993) The Quality of Life, Oxford Uni versity Press; Martha Nussbaum (2003) ‘Capabilities as Fundamental Entitlements: Sen and Social Justice’, pp. 33–59 in Feminist Economics 9; Amartya Sen (2005) ‘Human Rights and Capabilities’, pp. 151–166 in Journal of Human Development 6(2).