Ghost Citizens

Ghost Citizens looks at people who are stateless while remaining in the country they regard as home, a country that does not recognize them as citizens. Jamie Chai Yun Liew calls them "ghost citizens" and uses the idea to describe a global experience of double oppression: being invisible to the state while also being feared in law.

The term also covers two troubling state practices. One is ghosting a state's own citizens. The other is conferring ghost citizenship, which means casting people as foreigners without any legal proof. Liew's research draws on law, legal processes and interviews with stateless persons and their advocates. She examines international and domestic case law and administrative decision making. She finds an emerging practice in which states point to a mother figure, constructed in law as racialized, foreign and potentially disloyal, to portray a person as not kin and therefore another state's responsibility.

Malaysia serves as the case study. By tracing British colonial legal remnants there, Liew shows how post-colonial, democratic and multi-juridical states use law, legal processes and older ideas of racial categories to create and sustain statelessness.

The book challenges accepted norms of state recognition. It calls for borrowing ideas from other areas of law, including Indigenous legal traditions and family law, to consider how communities might be organized around more respectful relations and treatment among kin.