This chapter explores denationalization, focusing on Indonesian foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs). Post-9/11 and during the Arab Spring, Western democracies tightened border control to combat terrorism, enabling the stripping of citizenship from involved individuals. Denationalization, via law or public-authority decisions, emerged as a contentious counter-terrorism tool. Indonesia, as a Muslim-majority Southeast Asian nation, partially embraced denationalization, refusing to repatriate Indonesian FTFs. This aligns with global security concerns but raises statelessness questions. The chapter examines denationalization’s legal framework, international obligations, and the blurred line between de jure and de facto statelessness. Critics argue that disproportionately applying denationalization to Muslims undermines human rights, inter-state cooperation and international justice. Refusal to repatriate Indonesian FTFs raises concerns about long-term consequences and due process. Understanding denationalization nuances is vital, considering its impact on the citizenship rights of individuals involved in terrorism.

While statelessness remains a global phenomenon, it is a global issue with an Asian epicentre. This chapter situates the book within the context and multi-disciplinary scholarship on statelessness in Asia by reviewing the causes, conditions and/or challenges of statelessness. It recognizes statelessness in this region as a phenomenon beyond forced migration and highlights the arbitrary and discriminatory use of state power in producing and sustaining statelessness. The chapter reviews the ‘state of statelessness’ in Asia, including applicable international, regional and national legal frameworks. It also maps some of the core themes that emerge from the contributors’ examination of the causes and conditions of statelessness in Asia. These include: the relationship between ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic diversity and statelessness; the legacies of colonialism; contemporary politics surrounding nation-building, border regimes and mobilities; as well as intersecting vulnerabilities. The chapter concludes with some preliminary thoughts on frameworks of analysis and future research agendas, including challenges and prospects for reform.

This chapter discusses the 1953 legal challenge to Ceylon’s (present-day Sri Lanka) voter registration laws before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, one of the first against domestic legislation on citizenship from a former British colony. The Kodakan Pillai appeal, as the case was known, was part of multiple challenges to the immigration, nationality and citizenship regime in Ceylon at the time which discriminated against people who had migrated to Ceylon from India but had permanently settled there for multiple generations. The appeal ultimately failed, and the malaiyaha thamilar – plantation laborers and their descendants – form part of minority populations in Sri Lanka today, stigmatized as ‘migrants’ and outsiders, frequently lacking documentation and evidence of citizenship, and consequently, to land ownership or welfare benefits. Drawing on a rich legal archive of citizenship applications filed before the Commission for Indian and Pakistani Residents in the 1950s, alongside the Kodakan Pillai appeal, this chapter serves as an illustration for why the legal history of statelessness in Asia is important. Given this historical context, it also cautions against solutions to statelessness in the region that solely rely on improved documentation of political belonging.

Citizenship and taxation are closely related. While only two countries tax on the basis of citizenship, residency as it is implicated in abode and domicile, determines taxation obligations, criteria, and rates. Countries tax on the basis of residency, applying a 183- day presence rule together with other tests that cluster around definitions of ‘the home’ to establish abode and/or domicile which are invoked to classify taxpayers and their payments. Since 1984, a number of countries have been offering Citizenship by Investment (CBI) and Residence by Investment (RBI) programmes as incentives to encourage High Net Worth Individuals (HNWIs) to migrate and settle within their jurisdictions. Competition for CBI and RBI has intensified since the turn of the twenty-first century. These programmes allow both states and their HNWI clients to negotiate abode, domicile, and home to reduce tax obligations. While anthropologists have long since abandoned assumptions that fix culture to specific places, tax authorities struggle to accommodate the mobile livelihoods that are instantiated in CBI and RBI programmes. While the majority of citizens continue to pay tax in place, HNWIs, with multiple homes in multiple places, treat citizenship as a commodity to reduce, and even entirely escape taxation.

Tax is both an aspect of everyday life for people round the globe, bound up in political governance, and central to the organisation of our resources and any efforts to promote equality. While tax is studied across multiple disciplines, in anthropology it has received less attention. This introduction argues that an anthropological approach to tax, which centres ethnographic data and non-normative understandings of fiscal relations, is crucial to a comprehensive appreciation of taxes and key to building more equitable futures. The introduction is structured around three main questions: what is tax, what is taxable, and what do taxes do? It maps out why it is important to talk about tax now, the crucial influences of an anthropology of tax, the current landscape of this small but growing field of work, and the future of anthropological approaches to tax.

This chapter investigates tax payments and self-making amongst Romanian migrants in London. Vicol demonstrates how taxation is a mode of anchoring oneself in a moral order premised on self-sufficiency. Although the UK’s mainstream media cast Romanian migrants through tropes of welfare dependency, Romanian self-narrations as hard working, taxpaying subjects enabled interlocutors to constitute themselves as good migrants. However, becoming a taxpayer in practice was also an exercise in a particular type of bureaucratic literacy. A host of digital barriers, language deficiencies, and unhelpful bureaucrats drove many to seek out private consultants who made a business of helping their co-nationals decode their obligations to HM Revenue and Customs. Thus, this chapter also explores taxpaying as a technical exercise of making oneself legible through the language of the fiscal authority. Taxation becomes part of the making of the migrant subject. It is about the paradoxical ways in which a digitising state premised on self-reliance prompts affirmations of independence at the level of discourse, while simultaneously generating new networks of dependency in practice.

This chapter explores how notions of reciprocity shape new fiscal subjectivities in Ghana’s capital Accra. Drawing on historical sources, public debates and observations in public tax forums, I first discuss the long-term dynamics of ‘tax bargaining’ in Ghana since the colonial times, premised on power holders providing sufficient evidence of recipocity and return for tax payments. Secondly, this chapter provides a portrait of the intimate stakes of reciprocity between the state and citizens that characterize the process of becoming a taxpayer. By zooming in on the aspirations of a single female trader who went through the bureaucratic journey of formalizing her business and becoming a taxpayer, I propose the notion of the “nurturing state” to illustrate the intimate, personalized qualities of reciprocity that characterise emerging fiscal subjectivities in Ghana.

This chapter addresses the three earliest constitutional lineages, in the USA, France and Poland. It shows how these constitutional forms were shaped by imperialism and how the intensification of military policies in the eighteenth century defined the patterns of citizenship that they developed. It also shows how, diversely, each constitutions established a polity with militarized features, so that the different between national and imperial rule was often slight. To explain this, it addresses Napoleonic constitutionalism in Fance and the tiered citizenship regimes that characterized the American Republic in the nineteenth century.

The conclusion of Money, Value, and the State reflects on the rise of a neoliberal government of value. The architecture of political economy for postcolonial Kenya, Tanzania, and Uganda—their currency management, agrarian credit, export monopolies, and price controls—was similar to how many other nation-states managed capitalism, exerted sovereignty, and cultivated citizenship in the postwar decades. And like many other parts of the world, by the late-1970s, the government of value in East Africa was challenged by new models of determining worth. The neoliberal proviso to “get prices right” targeted the legitimacy of the moneychanger state: instead of controlling the conversion between currencies and managing exchange rates, central banks would delegate power to commercial firms. It was likewise a call to eliminate state monopolies on the valuation of export crops and other commodities in favor of merchants’ power to set prices. Yet, instead of merely being a project of marketisation, neoliberalism was always a theory of state power and the ethos of citizenship. As structural adjustment was imposed—haltingly, imperfectly—by international creditors and their East African partners, the problematic of price continued to imply far more than the value of a commodity. It was a call to revalue the relationship among people and between citizens and states. As a result, the state government of value has not disappeared--it has been disavowed by central banks and bureaucracies that dismiss popular claims-making in favor of serving the sovereignty of capital.

This chapter explores how contemporary novelist Kamila Shamsie adapts dramatic forms to stage ideological and ethical conflicts in her works, focusing on her acclaimed 2017 novel Home Fire in particular. Through a discussion of Home Fire’s thematic and formal reworking of Sophocles’ Antigone in the context of contemporary debates about citizenship and civil rights in the UK, the chapter investigates the ways in which Shamsie’s novelistic dramatisation of ideas engenders a critique of the politics of belonging in the post-9/11 age. In particular, the chapter focuses on the staging of competing ethical and political demands via interpersonal conflict, the use of multi-perspectival narration to critically refract contemporary concerns about citizenship and civil rights, and the representation of forms of mediation and public discourse in Shamsie’s novel.

Chapter 1 explores how the elites’ economic republican project, based on the modern science of political economy, was closely linked to ordinary people’s desire to consume foreign goods. It explores how for those in power as well as for those seeking recognition as political subjects, ideas and practices of citizenship were inevitably tied to participation as consumers in the marketplace – understood not as a mere container of economic transactions but as a node of complex social processes and a creator of cultural and political activity. By so doing, the chapter reveals that in nineteenth-century Colombia, politics was everywhere, and the marketplace was no exception.

Focusing on the afterlife of the Freedom Edict of April 7, 1800, the chapter moves the story into the nineteenth century, a period of imperial crisis that saw the emergence of liberal trends in the empire as well as new stakeholders in the historical context of the island and, more generally, of the Spanish Atlantic world. Chapter 9 focuses on the problems that the emancipated cobreros faced in actualizing a corporate community model along the lines of colonial Indian law. It further compares El Cobre’s predicament in the new period with that of two other recognized Indian pueblos of El Caney and Jiguani, a situation that resonated elsewhere in the Spanish Atlantic in the postcolonial Latin American republics. Questions about native rights, race, and citizenship, about civil and political rights, about corporate and individual land rights emerged in this new political context, especially with the globalization of El Cobre. This globalization was linked to the arrival of French refugees and the development of a British mining industry in the region. These emerging trends led to the erasure of major aspects of the Freedom Edict of 1800 by the early 1840s.

I build upon the earlier discussion – in Chapter 3 – of internal forms of social "tiering" and exclusion to further interrogate the politics of belonging in Gulf monarchies, this time through the employment of foreign labor. I disentangle the ways in which foreign labor plays a role in the shaping and consolidation of the national community, and I distinguish among European "expats," non-GCC Arabs, Asian and African laborers. I argue that labor from the three different categories play similar but also distinct roles in the delineation of national community: While they are differentially incorporated in ways that protect the "nation" and appease the citizen-subject, varying degrees of marginality reflect Gulf society’s perceptions or aspirations of the difference between itself and "the other(s)." Additionally, I examine some of the peculiarities of the importation, organization and incorporation of foreign labor, connect them to the normative tradition, and consider how they serve the ruler’s objective to manage and control society.

Follows the further decline of American trade in the Mediterranean and the physical decline and death of the three consuls, all of whom become somewhat disillusioned with the United States and the State Department while unsuccessfully trying to insure that their families can continue to prosper in the Mediterranean.