Ghost Citizens: Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law

by Jamie Chai Yun Liew

Ghost Citizens is about in situ stateless people, persons who live in a country they consider their own but which does not recognize them as citizens. Liew develops the concept of the “ghost citizen” to understand a global experience and a double of being invisible and feared in law. The term also refers to two troubling state ghosting their own citizens and conferring ghost citizenship (casting persons as foreigners without legal proof). Told through an examination of law, legal processes and interviews with stateless persons and their advocates, this deeply researched book examines international and domestic jurisprudence as well as administrative decision making to show an emerging practice where states are pointing to a mother figure, constructed in law as racialized, foreign and potentially disloyal, to depict persons as not kin and therefore the responsibility of other states. By tracing British colonial legal vestiges in the case study of Malaysia, Liew shows how contemporary post-colonial, democratic and multi-juridical states deploy law and its processes and historical ideas of racial categories to create and maintain statelessness. This book challenges established norms of state recognition and calls for a discussion of ideas borrowed from other areas of law, including Indigenous legal traditions and family law, on how we should organize our communities with more respectful relations and treatment among kin.

187 pages, Kindle Edition

Published February 22, 2024

About the author

Jamie Chai Yun Liew is the recipient of the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop. She is a lawyer and law professor specializing in immigration, refugee, and citizenship law and the creator of the podcast Migration Conversations. Dandelion is her first novel. She lives in Ottawa with her family.

Reviews

[Lauren · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars. this book gets into some interesting questions, and presents a unique case study of stateless Malaysian “ghost citizens”. it was well-situated in the research and made several important points. in particular, Liew’s discussion of the construction of blame around and personal responsibility placed on stateless individuals for not “taking initiative” or “exhausting their options” resonated with me. i think this framework, and a few of her other points, definitely have wide-ranging applications to analyzing how people interact with states. however, i don’t see this research being as universally applicable as the description claims - it’s pretty grounded in Malaysia, and i would have liked more exploration of how Liew’s claims about the nature of statelessness would hold true in other jurisdictions. i also found it a little academic/immaterial in some places, and i consider myself as someone with a high tolerance for that. however, i’ll definitely be picking up more books in this subject and from this author!