Motivations for and Consequences of Deliberate Contractions of the State’s Administrative Power

• In Event: 1454 - Law and State Power

Abstract

I explicate a new framework for making sense of the existence of unregistered populations: the deliberate withholding or retraction of the state’s administrative reach. I introduce the concept of strategic omission, which represents an inversion of conventional logics of state-building. I define omission as the condition of being left out of state administrative apparatuses—namely, civil registers, identity management systems, and censuses. I argue that especially in spaces with permeable borders, volatile migration flows, or bright ethnic boundaries, political actors may choose to contract rather than expand the reach of the state, keeping unwanted populations in a condition of legal omission in an effort to undermine their claims to rights and belonging. An insidious logic underlies strategic omission. To prevent unwanted peoples from interfacing with and gaining rights and resources from governmental institutions, they must first be deprived of a more fundamental capacity: their ability to establish their legal personhood before the state.

Author

• Amanda Rachel Cheong, Princeton University