There are millions of stateless people in the world \u2013 people who are not recognized as citizens in any country whatsoever. Long considered an issue tied intricately with migration, Professor Jamie Liew\u2019s research on statelessness is breaking new ground, exploring the legal limbo of a subset of stateless people who are legally homeless despite strong ties to a distinct place they call home. <\/p>\n\n
Professor Liew<\/span><\/span><\/a> is interested in a specific category of stateless persons that she has dubbed \u201cghost citizens<\/span>\u201d.<\/span> Ghost citizens are stateless people who claim to be living in their \u201cown\u201d or home country, yet who are not recognized as citizens by that country. These people may <\/span><\/span>have deep and meaningful ties to this \u201chome\u201d country \u2014 they may have family that has lived there for many generations, children or parents who are born there, or they may be employed in that country. What they lack is any form of legal identity to anchor them to the place they consider to be their home.<\/span><\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\n Fascinated by the differential treatment stateless people receive as compared with refugees, Professor Liew has conducted field-defining research to clarify why the international community has not addressed statelessness with the same rigour as refugee protection. Using socio-legal, ethnographic, critical race and feminist methodologies and theories, she takes particular care to privilege the perspectives of stateless and former stateless persons, as well as their families and their advocates. Professor Liew\u2019s interest in this area was borne out of personal experience. Her own parents immigrated to Canada from Brunei, and her father was not granted citizenship when he was born in Brunei, leaving him stateless. This inspired her to undertake the first in-depth case study of the historical and institutional roots of statelessness in Malaysia.<\/p>\n\n Earlier this year, Professor Liew published <\/span>Ghost Citizens: Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law<\/span><\/i><\/a> (Fernwood Publishing), which examines the legal and administrative systems that post-colonial states have inherited and continue to use in conferring and denying citizenship. The book sheds light on how people are made stateless at government offices, registrars and counters where people apply for identification cards and citizenship. The book also explores the bargains racial minorities made in nascent Malaysia and how those bargains led to constitutional and legal frameworks that reproduce differentiated and hierarchical notions of citizenship. This work provides a new socio-legal lens on the issue, exposing how interactions and encounters with government bureaucrats must be examined alongside any scholarship that calls for legal reform.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n\nGhost Citizens : studying the systems that confer or deny citizenship<\/h3>\n\n