Nationalism and the Unmaking of Citizens in the DR, Kenya and India

• In Event: Immigration, Documentation, and Social Protection in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

My study analyzes efforts by contemporary nationalist-leaning governments to further exclude groups who represent “foreign intruders” in so far as they share the ethnic origins of hostile neighboring countries. With reference to Dominicans of Haitian descent, Somali Kenyans, and Assamese Muslims in India, it illustrates why governments in these countries have pursued a strategy of exclusion and how they have done so. Nationalism in the context of state- building efforts explain their shared motivations. The imposition of onerous administrative rules and procedures is the main strategy by which they do so in common.

In three cases located in different world regions, with different state capacities and varied geopolitical relations, nationalist governments exploited the documentary deficiencies of the groups in question to entrench their exclusion as “foreign others” when it came time to modernize and regularize citizenship rolls. History and previous discrimination were what created these evidentiary deficiencies in the first place. Rather than evict those who could not produce the requisite nationality-granting papers (a tall and politically controversial order in contemporary times), governments ostensibly allowed them to re-instate their citizenship by navigating onerous administrative processes that most people could not complete.

Author

• Wendy Hunter, University of Texas, Austin