Unmaking Citizenship: Temporal and spatial dimensions of precarious citizenship among Biharis in Bangladesh

• In Event: Political Sociology Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Street Level Politics (Table 10)

Abstract

Despite their formal recognition as citizens since 2008, Biharis – a minority group in Bangladesh – continue to experience exclusion and stigma, rendering their citizenship functionally precarious. Drawing on ethnographic observation, interviews, and legal archives, this paper develops a Global South-centered theorization of precarious citizenship involving minoritized citizens whose rights are systematically undermined. Precarity operates for them through interlocking temporal and spatial state strategies such as bureaucratic delays, omission, shifting thresholds, camp segregation, territorial stigma, and everyday bordering. These mechanisms produce durable liminality whereby, Bihari citizenship exists simultaneously as a legal fact and a social impossibility. The ‘camp-people’ label functions as a racialized and postcolonial boundary that mediates access to rights and deservingness. By situating precarity within postcolonial state practices, this paper challenges Northern assumptions of citizenship as a marker of entitlement and offers a Global South framework for analyzing marginalized populations across diverse contexts.

Author

• Md Kamrul Islam, University of Illinois at Chicago