10

Human Rights Are Not Enough

Understanding Noncitizenship and Noncitizens

in Their Own Right

Tendayi Bloom

introduction
Within liberal theory, human rights are often seen as pre-institutional, and so are not
tied, by definition, to any particular state. This differs from citizen rights, which
derive from the individual–state relationship. Yet, in practice it is common for
individuals to have to prove some citizen or quasi-citizen relationship with a
particular state in order to claim their human rights. Expanding citizenship to
include more individuals may provide a useful interim measure for some, but it
leaves others behind and does not challenge the idea and practice of making access
to human rights contingent on citizenship or quasi-citizenship.1 In this chapter,
I suggest that while human rights are important, they are theoretically and practic-
ally insufficient to ensure everyone’s basic needs are met.2 I argue that to address
this, it is crucial to acknowledge that citizenship is not the only form of relationship
that can exist between an individual and a state. It is also necessary in both theory
and practice to recognize substantive relationships of “noncitizenship” as well as the
rights claims that noncitizenship creates.
In this chapter, I offer noncitizen rights not as an alternative but as comple-
mentary to both human rights and citizen rights. I argue that noncitizenship is not a
negation of citizenship, but another form of individual–state relationship produced

I acknowledge my thanks to participants on the panel “Malleable Nature and Challenges of

Citizenship” at the International Political Studies Association World Congress 2018 in Brisbane for
their feedback on an early version of this chapter, and to colleagues at the University of
Connecticut for encouraging me to develop it. I am particularly grateful to Catherine Buerger,
Jillian Chambers, Molly Land, Kathryn Libal, Jess Melvin, Narissa Ramsundar, Jo Shaw,
Katherine Tonkiss, and Susan Williams for their critical reading of earlier drafts. Remaining errors
are mine.
1
See also L. Kingston, Fully Human (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019).
2
Chapters 9 and 12 by Serena Parekh and Jaya Ramji-Nogales in this volume share similar
concerns and frame their proposed solutions differently.

167
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 168 Tendayi Bloom

by the construction and reconstruction of states. The noncitizen relationship

thereby generates obligations that are tied, by definition, to specific states.3
Although human rights are conceptually important and have been useful in
asserting rights for people who have struggled to access even the most basic
rights in any other way, I argue that it is essential also to acknowledge the insti-
tutional, necessarily noncontractual, relationship of noncitizenship and the rights
associated with it.
Noncitizenship rights arise from diverse existing philosophical theories for how a
state is imbued with legitimacy. For example, state legitimacy may be thought to be
founded on its ability to provide security and stability, protect human dignity,
promote agency, and ensure coherent and self-governing national communities.
States may appear to be justified insofar as they ensure these goods for citizens.
However, in fulfilling these goals (to some extent) for some, states and the state
system may also actively impair access to these goods for others. The way in which
the provision of goods for some people harms those thereby excluded from those
goods has implications for state legitimacy. It is, then, not enough to justify the state
and the multistate system with respect to those who benefit from them. It is also
necessary either to provide a justification for the state with respect to those who must
bear the burden of its actions and find ways to live despite it or, at the very least, to
explain why this justification is unnecessary.
Thus, I argue that relationships of both citizenship and noncitizenship are
fundamental to most conceptions of state construction (whether acknowledged or
not). Constructing and maintaining a modern state creates both types of relation-
ship. They are not binary or opposites. Neither is derivative from the other. They
represent different modes of relating to the state. This means that it is not possible to
understand the state fully without understanding both noncitizenship and citizen-
ship. As such, both must be part of the legitimation story of the state. On this basis, in
this chapter I offer an alternative way of thinking about the relationship between
rights and the institutions of states and of the multistate system. This framework
could in turn drive a rethinking of institutional arrangements in ways that better
recognize the rights claims of those who bear the heaviest burden of that system.
Noncitizen rights are institutional and particular. They do not challenge, but
complement (nonparticular) claims a person has to human rights by virtue of their
humanity.

why noncitizen rights

As Jaya Ramji-Nogales observes in Chapter 12, the lists of human rights as presented
in existing international treaties represent the outcome of political negotiations
3
The notion of “noncitizenship” is developed in detail in T. Bloom, Noncitizenism: Recognising
Noncitizen Capabilities in a World of Citizens (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

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 Understanding Noncitizenship and Noncitizens 169

among parties with different normative frameworks and interests within particular
political contexts.4 As she shows, despite the messiness with which they came into
being, these treaties have been vital to establishing basic norms and are crucial in
understanding how the claiming of human rights functions today. However, they are
based on an understanding of human rights that is fundamentally state based.5
This is seen in the preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights,
where the Declaration is presented as a “common standard of achievement for all
peoples and all nations.”6 That is, it is not directed toward individuals per se but
rather as they are grouped into “peoples” and “nations,” governed by states with the
power to protect, grant, or withhold rights. The underlying assumption that human
rights are dependent upon formal membership in a particular state (“citizenship”) is
pervasive in human rights literature. Most of the classic writers on the universality of
human rights sometimes, if not as a matter of course, slip into the language of
citizenship when they really mean personhood.
Thus, while human rights are theoretically pre-institutional, they are in practice
institutionally derived and usually delivered through citizenship.7 Human rights are
harder to enforce in the absence of a legally recognized relationship with a state
because it is difficult to establish a duty-holder. On the face of it, while negative
rights (like the right not to be tortured or arbitrarily killed) most obviously give rise to
perfect obligations against everyone (everyone, including every state official, has an
obligation not to torture or arbitrarily kill), it is harder to establish this in the case of
positive rights (like the right to subsistence or shelter).8 However, even negative
rights become more difficult to assign if they are associated with an underlying right
to be somewhere un-tortured and thus become part of a community.9 This means
that while human rights might be universal in principle, in practice many people do
not have a route to claiming even the most basic rights.

4
Chapter 12.
5
Dominant debates regarding the underlying politics of international human rights, and their
implications, often do not engage with this state focus. Two key ways in which these debates are
framed are found, e.g., in D. Thomas, The Helsinki Effect (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2001) and S. Tharoor, “Are Human Rights Universal?” (2002) 16(4) World Policy Journal
1–6, respectively.
6
Universal Declaration of Human Rights, December 10, 1948, United Nations General
Assembly Res. 217A(III).
7
H. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (San Diego, CA: Harcourt Books, 1994); see also J.
Ramji-Nogales, “‘The Right to Have Rights’: Undocumented Migrants and State Protection”
(2015) 63 Kansas Law Review 1045–1065; B. Blitz, “The State and the Stateless,” in T. Bloom,
K. Tonkiss, and P. Cole (eds.), Understanding Statelessness (Abingdon: Routledge, 2017).
8
O. O’Neill, “Rights, Obligations and World Hunger,” in F. Jiménez (ed.), Poverty and Social
Justice: Critical Perspectives: A Pilgrimage Toward Our Own Humanity (Tempe: Bilingual
Press, 1987), pp. 86–100.
9
This is presented in different ways by J. X. Fan, “On the Two Sides of Human Rights” (2003) 9
International Legal Theory 79–86, and C. Fabre, “Constitutionalising Social Rights” (1998) 6
(3) The Journal of Political Philosophy 263–284.

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 170 Tendayi Bloom

My primary intention here is not to critique human rights, but to put forward a
case for the recognition of an additional type of rights. This is needed for two main
reasons. First, assumptions about human rights often slip into assumptions about
citizen rights. Second, states rely on relationships of noncitizenship for their exist-
ence and these relationships, I would argue, affect the state’s legitimacy. In the
construction and maintenance of states, relationships of both citizenship and non-
citizenship are also constructed. That is, noncitizenship (not to be confused with the
hyphenated “non-citizenship,” as the negation of citizenship) is a real and founda-
tional aspect of the modern state, and one which has thus far gone largely
unacknowledged.
Some special statuses like refugee status, work visas, or residency have the same
form as, but are not quite equivalent to, citizenship. I call these “quasi-citizen”
statuses.10 Although these statuses represent relationships between individuals and a
state of which they are not citizens, what is relevant about these relationships is that
they demonstrate an individual’s almost-but-not-quite citizenship claim against a
particular state. Quasi-citizenship is also related to notions of “denizenship.”
Sometimes this term refers to people with quasi-citizen statuses. Sometimes it is
used more broadly to include all those who have a strong relationship with a state or
with a community in a state, but are unable to access citizenship.11 Like quasi-
citizenship, denizenship is also defined in deference to citizenship. This is not the
case for noncitizenship.
People with quasi-citizen statuses and those understood as denizens may in
practice also experience strong noncitizen relationships with the states in
question. This is because their relationships with those states cannot only be
understood through citizenship and associated terminology. Citizenship is theorized
in a number of ways, for example, as political status or recognition,12 as bound
up in rights and duties,13 as membership connected with identity (variously

10
The language of “quasi-citizenship” is developed in more detail throughout Bloom,
Noncitizenism.
11
For analysis of different uses of the language of “denizenship,” see T. Golash-Bosa, “Feeling
Like a Citizen, Living As a Denizen: Deportees’ Sense of Belonging” (2016) 60(13) American
Behavioral Scientist 1575–1589; T. Hammar, Democracy and the Nation State: Aliens,
Denizens, and Citizens in a World of International Migration (Beatty, NV: Avebury, 1990);
R. Bauböck, “Migration and Citizenship” (1991) 18(1) New Community 27–48.
12
E. E., “United Stateless in the United States: Reflections from an Activist,” in T. Bloom and
L. Kingston (eds.), Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 2021); R. Lister, “Dialectics of Citizenship,” (1997) 12(4) Hypatia
6–26.
13
T. H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class (1950), reprinted in J. Manza and M. Saunder
(eds.), Inequality and Society (New York: Norton, 2009); interrogated in Y. Soysal, Limits of
Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994); J. Dunn, “Political Obligation,” in D. Held (ed.), Political Theory Today (Stanford,
CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); J. Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 1999).

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 Understanding Noncitizenship and Noncitizens 171

defined)14 or shared values,15 as a practice,16 or, indeed, as some mix of these and
other approaches.17 Overall, theorizations of citizenship assume that somehow the
interests of the citizen (or, in this case, the quasi-citizen) and those of the state are
affected by each other. There is the idea that the citizen/quasi-citizen gives up power
or resources or labor to the state and gets some form of altered power or protection
back, or a share in communal goods. Underlying these ideas is the notion that
citizens/quasi-citizens live well, or live, in one way or another thanks to the state.
Like citizenship, noncitizenship has no meaning outside the institutional arrange-
ment of states. And like citizenship, noncitizenship is a relationship that gives rise to
vulnerabilities and rights claims. Yet, unlike citizenship, which includes by defin-
ition some form of mitigation of the vulnerability and power disparity that it creates,
noncitizenship does not include this mitigation.
Noncitizenship and citizenship are not mutually dependent or mutually exclu-
sive, but equally fundamental. This means that a person could be in a citizen
relationship (including a quasi-citizen relationship) with a particular state and at
the same time be in a noncitizen relationship with that same state. For example,
people may be recognized as citizens but, because of poverty or discrimination, be
unable to make full use of their citizenship in some dimension or dimensions.18
Such individuals struggle under the power of the state without citizen-mitigation of
that power in key dimensions. They are, then, in both a citizen and a noncitizen
relationship with that state. Others may be citizens of a state that they do not believe
to be legitimate. They, too, can be described as being in both citizen and noncitizen
relationships with the same state. This is clearest in the case of colonial states like the
modern United States, in which there are populations for whom US citizenship is

14
The notion of membership and identity is explored from different angles. M. Mamdani,
“Beyond Settler and Native as Political Identities: Overcoming the Political Legacies of
Colonialism” (2001) 43(4) Comparative Studies in Society and History 651–664; K. Tonkiss,
Migration and Identity in a Post-National World (London: Palgrave, 2013); Y. Tamir, “United
We Stand? The Educational Implications of the Politics of Difference” (1993) 12 Studies in
Philosophy and Education 57–70; K. Belton, Statelessness in the Caribbean: The Paradox of
Belonging in a Postnational World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017).
15
E.g., Tonkiss, Migration and Identity in a Post-National World; S. Sassen, “Towards Post-
National and Denationalized Citizenship,” in E. F. Isin and B. S. Turner (eds.), Handbook of
Citizenship Studies (London: Sage, 2002), pp. 277–292; T. Miller, “Cultural Citizenship,” in
Isin and Turner (eds.), Handbook of Citizenship Studies; see also A. Shachar, The Birthright
Lottery (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).
16
Essays in E. F. Isin and G. M. Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship (London: Zed, 2008).
17
Joppke provides a way to frame this in C. Joppke, “Transformation of Citizenship: Status,
Rights, Identity” (2007) 11(1) Citizenship Studies 37–48.
18
Consider, for example: C. R. Epp, S. Maynard-Moody, and D. Haider-Markel, Pulled Over:
How Policy Stops Define Race and Citizenship (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014); S.
T. Russell, “Queer in America: Citizenship for Sexual Minority Youth” (2002) 6(4) Applied
Developmental Science 258–263; T. Bloom, “Endometriosis and Noncitizenship: What Makes
Suffering Relevant?” (2020) 81 Discover Society, https://archive.discoversociety.org/2020/06/03/
endometriosis-and-noncitizenship-what-makes-suffering-relevant/.

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 172 Tendayi Bloom

the only internationally recognized rights-generating status available, who at the

same time reject the United States as a colonial power.19
Noncitizenship is a mode of relationship between an individual and a state in
which the individual must live and pursue their ends to some extent despite that
state. Though this is understood in a variety of ways, theoretically states aim to
promote the wellbeing of citizens. The idea is that insofar as a person relates to a
state as a citizen, that person is better off than if there had been no state. I suggest
that noncitizenship functions differently. Insofar as a person functions as a non-
citizen in relation to a state, the wellbeing of that person is not designed into the
construction of that state. Often the implications of this for the person’s life may be
minimal, particularly where the person in question also has strong citizen relation-
ships. However, where the noncitizen relationship is the overriding relationship that
person has with the state with most power over them, it may present a significant
impediment to that person’s life.20 Although some people in a noncitizen relation-
ship may find ways to flourish, they do so despite a state that has significant power
over their lives. Indeed, thanks to their noncitizen relationship, some people may be
prevented from enjoying even basic goods. This is problematic for any liberal theory
of the state that relies for its justification on the idea that the state makes the lives of
those affected better.
Noncitizenship is not contingent on citizenship, but looking at citizenship can be
helpful in developing a picture of how noncitizenship functions. An individual may
be in a citizen relationship with many states at once. They may live in the state of
which they are a citizen, or live far away from it. Their citizenship might be all-
important or it might not be particularly important to them or to their life. Similarly,
individuals can be simultaneously in noncitizen relationships with more than one
state, though these relationships may have more or less relevance to their lives.
A person can be in a strongly felt noncitizen relationship even with a state that is far
away, but they may also be in a noncitizen relationship that is barely felt, even with
the state on whose territory they are standing. For example, person G, an employee
of an international firm living happily within a closed compound of compatriots in
country X may not feel their noncitizen relationship with X very much at all. On the
other hand, consider person H, who lives in state Y, downstream from powerful state

19
See, e.g., K. Bruyneel, “Challenging American Boundaries: Indigenous People and the ‘Gift’ of
US Citizenship” (2004) 18(1) Studies in American Political Development 30–43; N. T. C.
Marques, “Divided We Stand: The Haudenosaunee, Their Passport and Legal Implications
of Their Recognition in Canada and the United States” (2011) 13 San Diego International Law
Journal 383–426; A. Witkin, “To Silence a Drum: The Imposition of United States Citizenship
on Native Peoples” (1995) 21(2) Historical Reflections/Réflexions Historiques 353–383; T. Bloom,
“Members of Colonised Groups, Statelessness and the Right to Have Rights,” in Bloom,
Tonkiss, and Cole (eds.), Understanding Statelessness.
20
A person could potentially be in a noncitizen relationship with any state, but we are only
interested here in the cases where that relationship has an impact on the way in which a person
is able to live out their life.

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 Understanding Noncitizenship and Noncitizens 173

Z that is syphoning or polluting their primary water source. H may feel their
noncitizen relationship with Z strongly despite not being on its territory. In addition,
although they are not theoretically dependent on each other, the noncitizen and
citizen relationships that an individual has may interact with and affect each other.
For example, perhaps G is also a citizen or quasi-citizen of a powerful country that
can mitigate G’s relationship with X, while Y is unable to do this for H.
A stronger noncitizen relationship gives rise to stronger claims. Consider the
impact of CO2 emissions and the global warming that results. Some countries
produce significant levels of CO2 emissions.21 Everyone who must live well, or even
just live, despite this is in a noncitizen relationship with the states concerned.
However, some people are not affected as strongly as others. They may experience
slightly different weather, but barely notice the effects. They are in a weak non-
citizen relationship and this does not, then, give rise to strong claims. However,
some people are affected much more strongly. This includes those whose traditional
way of life has been made impossible (e.g., because crops no longer grow in the
same way or animals can no longer survive).22 It also includes those currently living
in Kiribati, which is predicted to be the first state to be entirely submerged by rising
sea levels.23 In these cases, I suggest that affected individuals may have stronger
noncitizen claims against polluting states. Even if it is true that the ability to select its
citizenry is core to a state’s sovereignty (which I’m not sure it is), recognizing
noncitizenship means acknowledging that states have relationships with more indi-
viduals than those that they have selected as citizens.
Although there are similarities, noncitizenship functions differently to citizen-
ship. Whereas notions of consent or reciprocity are built into various framings of
citizenship, by definition noncitizenship functions differently. No matter your
theory of citizenship or of the state, noncitizenship includes an element of the
involuntary. This affects the rights that arise as a result. This involuntariness in the
noncitizen relationship also applies to the state. In the world of modern states,
I argue that even in denying an individual any formal relationship, a state is thereby
creating a relationship with that individual, albeit one it would rather not have. And
that this relationship gives rise to rights claims.
21
International Energy Agency, “Global CO2 emissions in 2019,” February 11, 2020, www.iea.org/
articles/global-co2-emissions-in-2019. See also discussion in S. Caney, “Just Emissions” (2012) 40
(1) Philosophy and Public Affairs 255–301.
22
Presented already in the 1990s, e.g., in H. Le Houérou, “Climate Change, Drought, and
Desertification” (1996) 34(2) Journal of Arid Environments 133–185; J. Snorek, “Contested Views
of the Causes of Rural to Urban Migration amongst Patoralists in Niger,” in B. Gebrewold and
T. Bloom (eds.), Understanding Migrant Decisions (Abingdon: Routledge, 2016), pp. 59–79.
23
M. Loughry and J. McAdam, “Kiribati – Relocation and Adaptation” (2008) 31 Forced
Migration Review 51–52; M. Risse, “The Right to Relocation: Disappearing Island Nations
and Common Ownership of the Earth” (2009) 23(3) Ethics and International Affairs 281–300;
K. Wilkinson Cross and P. Kingi, “Fonua Cultural Statelessness in the Pacific and the Effects
of Climate Change,” in Bloom and Kingston (eds.), Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem
of Citizenship.

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 174 Tendayi Bloom

noncitizen rights and global justice

Noncitizen rights provide a way to understand how particular rights claims may be
allocated to individuals within the multistate system, contributing to the global
justice tradition. Global justice thinking challenges state-focused justice thinking
as parochial, but it rarely engages with the problem of citizenship directly.24
A dominant branch of global justice theory emphasizes the implications of global
interconnectivity, focusing on the material injustices arising from existing arrange-
ments25 or the shaky legitimacy stories of underlying structures.26 I suggest that one
way to understand the concerns of global justice is by challenging the presumption
that citizenship is the only way of relating to a state or to the system of states.27
Recognizing noncitizen relationships as substantive and rights-generating can help
to show that global justice claims are specific and attributable.
I argue that the construction of noncitizenship is inherent in the construction of
the state and can be generated by its activities. This means that implications for
noncitizens must be part of the state’s legitimacy story, whatever form that legitimacy
story takes. Moreover, it is necessary to present that justification within the real and
limited global state structure. For example, there is not an infinite array of alterna-
tive and welcoming states and citizenries. To be justified, then, the theory of
noncitizenism requires that a nationalist acknowledges and addresses how national-
ist statehood both constructs noncitizenship and undermines coherent national
group politics. A liberal may need to engage with the noncitizen relationship of
both those excluded from a particular polity and those rejecting liberalism itself. And
so on. The world is messy and each state’s self-justification must take place within
this messy system of unfair power structures and contemporary realities affected by
painful histories. Noncitizen rights provide a tool to ensure that those who bear the
heaviest burdens of existing structures are taken into account in their own right.

24
Early proponents include a variety of approaches, such as H. O. Oruka, “The Philosophy of
Foreign Aid: A Question of the Right to a Human Minimum” (1989) 8 PRAXIS 465–475; H.
Shue, Basic Rights (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980); C. Beitz, Political Theory
and International Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). For a presenta-
tion of the global problem of citizenship, see T. Bloom, “The Problem of Citizenship in
Global Governance,” in Bloom and Kingston (eds.), Statelessness, Governance, and the
Problem of Citizenship.
25
Beitz, Political Theory and International Relations; C. Beitz, The Idea of Human Rights
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009); T. Pogge, World Poverty and Human Rights
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002).
26
E.g., K. Nkrumah, Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (New York: International
Publishers, 1966). Note that this was first published in 1965, while Nkrumah was president of
Ghana.
27
In fact, I suggest that painting over noncitizenship may have been an intentional strategy in the
political philosophy that justified colonial expansion and grounds contemporary liberalism,
e.g., Bloom, Noncitizenism, p. 31.

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 Understanding Noncitizenship and Noncitizens 175

My conception of noncitizen rights shares characteristics with some “political”

approaches to human rights. That is, according to a political approach to human
rights, such rights “confront the ideology of arbitrary power and inherited or exclu-
sive privilege.”28 My suggestion is that human rights as currently construed are also
necessarily tied up with the arbitrary power and inherited or exclusive privilege that
is the state and indeed the “nation state.” The notion of noncitizen rights explicitly
challenges this in a way that human rights cannot. In acknowledging noncitizen
rights, one acknowledges that the mechanisms that institute and protect citizen and
state power and privilege give rise to obligations toward those who are thereby
deprived of their own power and freedom. That is, those who must live despite
states and the state system that affect them have claims on those states and on
that system. The approach of noncitizen rights differs from political approaches to
human rights, then, in deriving from foundational questions about the legitimacy
of the state. It argues that noncitizenship is not other or abstract from the state
but instead part of what constitutes the state. This underlying difference in rationale
also gives rise to a practical difference: noncitizen rights identify particular obliga-
tion-holders.
Considering the realities of “statelessness” in this context can illustrate both how
noncitizen rights work and how this approach could be used to ground new
directions for the protection of rights.29 A person is considered “stateless” according
to international law if they are not recognized as a citizen of any country under the
operation of its law.30 People excluded from formal citizenship in this way are often
unable to assert their claim to even basic human rights. Such individuals can be left
without any citizenship because of problems of administration or conflicts between
citizenship regimes; it can also be intentionally produced through discriminatory
practices.31 However it arises, lacking citizenship can make it difficult for those
affected to access their human rights either within the state in which they live or
within the international community.

28
M. Goodhart, “Human Rights and the Politics of Contestation,” in M. Goodale (ed.), Human
Rights at the Crossroads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 33.
29
E.g., W. Conklin, Statelessness: The Enigma of the International Community (Oxford: Hart,
2014); K. Staples, Retheorising Statelessness: A Background Theory of Membership in World
Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).
30
This definition comes from the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons,
September 28, 1954, 360 U.N.T.S. 117, art. 1(1), except that the Convention refers instead to
“national.” As I do not have space here to enter into a discussion of the relationship between
“national” and “citizen,” I will stick to the word “citizen” that I have used throughout this
piece. For more on this terminological distinction in this sort of context, see K. Tonkiss,
“Statelessness and the Performance of Citizenship-As-Nationality,” in Bloom, Tonkiss, and
Cole (eds.), Understanding Statelessness.
31
Expanded, e.g., in L. van Waas, Nationality Matters (Antwerp: Intersentia, 2008); and in
different ways in the essays in Bloom, Tonkiss, and Cole (eds.), Understanding Statelessness
and Bloom and Kingston (eds.), Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship.

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 176 Tendayi Bloom

Although the noncitizen relationship I defend can pertain between a formal

citizen and their state of citizenship, statelessness represents the apotheosis of
noncitizenship. The deprivations currently associated with lacking any citizenship
provide a limit case for what can happen when, on the one hand, citizenship is both
assumed necessary for rights and left up to states to bestow and, on the other hand,
no other form of individual–state relationship is recognized as rights generating.
When individual states can effectively decide who they want to protect, people can
theoretically be – and in reality are – stranded in the world of states without being
able to claim any recognized rights-generating relationship anywhere within it, and
thus struggling to assert their status as humans.32
Recognition of noncitizen rights provides a way out of this, which is based, both
theoretically and practically, upon how things are today. Among those working to
end the rightslessness associated with statelessness, there is a strong tradition of
promoting the expansion of access to citizenship or other statuses that would give
individuals demonstrable claims against particular states. This is vital and urgent as
part of a larger project. It can be seen, for example, in the academic literature33 and
in the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees campaign to end stateless-
ness by 2024.34 There are many individuals whose lives could be made significantly
better if they could just prove some sort of recognized rights-generating connection
to the state with the most power over their lives. For these reasons, it is crucial that
citizenships are made more accessible and protections against the revocation of
citizenship made more secure.
But taken alone, the expansion of citizenship is inadequate for ensuring rights for
everyone. It carries three major risks. First, focusing only on expanding citizenship
and quasi-citizenship does not provide a solution for those who have no such
relationship and have no clear route to obtaining it. That is, it is not enough to
say “well, they ought to be citizens” if they are not. Second, it ignores cases where
individuals are overwhelmingly affected by a state to which they have no obvious
citizen claim. That is, it does not respond to the cases mentioned earlier of foreign
occupation or of those affected by a polluting upriver state. Third, this approach
does not allow for the political reality of individuals who want to reject the citizen-
ship of the state(s) with overwhelming control over their lives without giving up their
basic rights. Those who contest the existing constellation of states must currently do
so while those states in fact mediate access to vital goods and even recognition.

32
This is expressed by various writers with direct experience of statelessness. See, e.g., S. Zweig,
The World of Yesterday (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964), and E., “United Stateless
in the United States: Reflections from an Activist.”
33
See, e.g., Shachar, The Birthright Lottery; T. Kostakopoulou, The Future Governance of
Citizenship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); see also M. Walzer, Spheres of
Justice: A Defense of Plurality and Equality (New York: Basic Books, 1984).
34
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Global Plan to End Statelessness 2014–2024
(Geneva: UNHCR, 2013).

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 Understanding Noncitizenship and Noncitizens 177

Instead, there needs to be recognition of noncitizenship and the rights it generates,

and eventually a means to access to those rights without the need to demonstrate any
citizen or quasi-citizen status.
The terminology and framing of noncitizen rights provide vital tools for thinking
about global justice. They force a recognition that global justice considerations are not
abstract and the obligations that arise are not general. Instead, a state has specific and
institutional obligations toward those people who bear the burden of its existence and of
its actions. Acknowledging noncitizens in their own right means acknowledging that a
state cannot unilaterally absolve itself of considering a person’s interests and wellbeing.
Whereas human rights are general and arise from a person’s humanity, noncitizen
rights are particular and arise from a person’s relationship with a particular state or states.

contemporary citizenships and fuzzy citizen rights

Citizenship, whether formally recognized or not, comes with certain rights and duties,
the content of which is generally based on the legitimacy story of a particular state and
the real-world construction of its citizenship. In the past decade or so, some scholars
have suggested that there has been a detachment of citizenship from territory, so that
citizens are increasingly able to function as citizens from afar.35 This has been
discussed mostly with regard to voting, a particularly symbolic citizen right for
democratic states, with the creation of emigrant constituencies in national parlia-
ments, for example.36 Other scholars over the same period have suggested that some
countries have been gradually detaching territorially based rights from citizenship so
that even voting and the right to abode have become tied not to citizenship but instead
to sustained regular residence. These two sets of observations could seem at first
glance to be in conflict. That is, the traditional rights of citizenship are both decreas-
ingly and increasingly associated with living on the territory of a state, and increasingly
and decreasingly associated with formal citizenship. However, understanding how
these two observations interrelate (and indeed some theorists make both observations)
will be helpful in the discussion of noncitizenship and noncitizen rights.
First, citizenship has never had meaning only within the state to which that
citizenship is attached. A particularly iconic symbol of citizenship, the passport, is
intrinsically linked to movement across international borders, and so to the space
outside the territory of the state of citizenship.37 Meanwhile, states have long offered

35
E.g., G. Davies, “‘Any Place I Hang My Hat?’ or: Residence is the New Nationality” (2005) 11(1)
European Law Journal 43–56.
36
M. Collyer, “A Geography of Extra-Territorial Citizenship: Explanations of External Voting”
(2014) 2(1) Migration Studies 55–72; R. Bauböck, “Expansive Citizenship – Voting beyond
Territory and Membership” (2005) 38(4) Political Science and Politics 683–687.
37
Consider, e.g., J. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, 2018) and M. Salter, Rights of Passage: The
Passport in International Relations (London: Lynne Rienner, 2003).

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 178 Tendayi Bloom

a range of diplomatic and consular services to citizens outside their territories and
are now increasingly extending voting rights to citizens living far away. As of July
2020, 75 percent of countries had had some form of overseas voting in their most
recent elections.38 States also offer a range of other social services and forms of
assistance through their consulates.
In select cases, citizens of powerful states have even been excused from complying
with local justice systems, thanks to consular intercession. Consider, for example, the
case of Gillian Gibbons, a British teacher who was facing punishment for blasphemy
in Sudan, having named a class teddy bear “Mohamed.”39 Thanks to support from
the government of the United Kingdom and intercession from the President of
Sudan, Gibbons was eventually released and returned to the United Kingdom.40
This suggests that in some cases citizens are able to access the rights of citizenship
from afar and even be protected by the laws of their country of citizenship outside its
territory, affecting the nature of their relationship with the countries on whose
territories they stand. For the most part, the recognized rights of citizens qua citizens
outside their states of citizenship are discretionary and dependent upon the interests
and relative power of the states involved. In this case, Gibbons’ citizenship of the
United Kingdom helped to neutralize her noncitizenship in relation to Sudan.
Meanwhile, some countries have specific forms of overseas citizenship that do not
carry these benefits. Consider the United Kingdom, which intervened on behalf of
Gillian Gibbons. During the process of disentangling itself from an empire (and so
from a contiguous political space) that spanned a large part of the globe, the United
Kingdom has constructed a variety of citizenships. This includes citizenships that do
not provide the right to live in the country of citizenship, or which include specific
constraints on children inheriting citizenship from their parents. These two elem-
ents came to a head in the case of the grandchildren of people displaced from the
Chagos Islands. In 1965, the United States expressed a desire to build a military base
on Diego Garcia, the main island of the Chagos Islands. At the time, the Chagos
Islands was part of Mauritius, which was under UK control. The United Kingdom
separated Chagos from Mauritius to create the British Indian Ocean Territory
(BIOT), which was then lent to the United States for its military base. The people
living in Diego Garcia were forcibly relocated, mostly to other parts of Mauritius.
They had citizenship of the British Indian Ocean Territory but were not allowed to
live in it. In 1968, Mauritius declared Independence from Britain.41 In 2002, an Act

38
“Voting From Abroad Database – World,” International Institute for Democracy and Electoral
Assistance, www.idea.int/data-tools/world-view/52 (last visited July 30, 2020).
39
See, e.g., R. Crilly, “The Blasphemous Teddy Bear,” Time, November 26, 2007.
40
J. Gettleman, “Calls in Sudan for Execution of British Teacher,” The New York Times,
December 1, 2007; M. Weaver, “‘Muhammad’ Teddy Teacher to Be Freed,” The Guardian,
December 3, 2007.
41
See Legal Consequences of the Separation of the Chagos Archipelago from Mauritius in 1965,
International Court of Justice, February 25, 2019.

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 Understanding Noncitizenship and Noncitizens 179

of the UK Parliament (along with some specific amendments) meant that those who
had been displaced from the Chagos Islands were eligible for UK citizenship. Their
children were also eligible for UK citizenship. Their grandchildren were not.42 As a
result, Chagossians in exile potentially had citizenship of a country that they could
not visit and citizenship of another that they could not pass on. Not only did these
citizenships not neutralize noncitizenships in relation to other countries, they also
did not neutralize noncitizenships in relation to the United Kingdom.
Alongside the literature on extraterritorial citizenship is a discourse relating to an
increasing importance of residency over citizenship within a state. For example,
scholars presenting what they refer to as “post-national” citizenship emphasize that
an individual has rights and duties in relation to the state where they live because
they are a resident, they engage in its daily life, and they are affected by its political
structures.43 Although some of these texts offer empirical claims, for the most
part their claims are normative. The argument is that individuals should be able to
relate to a state in this way, even if currently they cannot. Where rights are
accessible in this way, they are mostly social or civil (access to health care, for
example). Insofar as there are political rights associated with regular residence, they
are mostly only on the local level (i.e., voting in local elections but not general
elections or referenda). In addition, these rights of residents sit against a backdrop of
liminality, since continued “regular” residence itself is not a given. They are citizen-
like or quasi-citizen claims in a context where that relationship is contested
or vulnerable.
Most residents in most states are citizens.44 For those that are not, in order to be a
“regular” resident a person must have some sort of special status that might derive
from a work visa, refugee status, student visa, multilateral or bilateral agreement, or
some other arrangement approved by the rights-granting state. That is, a quasi-
citizen status. What is key is that these statuses approximate citizenship. This means
that, while regular residence is important to rights and is often a precursor to
citizenship,45 for our purposes, it should not really be seen as replacing citizenship
as the primary locus for rights claiming. These alternative routes to rights claims
have gained more relevance, but only insofar as they represent some form of quasi-
citizenship.

42
E.g., L. Jeffery, “‘Unusual Immigrants,’ or, Chagos Islanders and Their Confrontations with
British Citizenship” (2011) 18(2) Anthropology in Action 33–44.
43
Soysal, Limits of Citizenship; J. Bhabha, “Belonging in Europe: Citizenship and Post-national
Rights” (1999) 51 International Social Science Journal 11–23; Tonkiss, Migration and Identity.
44
There are exceptions to this. For example, according to data from the Government of Kuwait,
in 2019 so-called non-Kuwaitis made up 70 percent of the Kuwaiti resident population.
“Population Estimates,” Central Statistics Bureau, Government of Kuwait, www.csb.gov.kw/
Pages/Statistics_en?ID=67&ParentCatID=%201 (last visited July 30, 2020).
45
E.g., S. Robertson, “Contractualization, Depoliticisation and the Limits of Solidarity: Noncitizens
in Contemporary Australia” (2015) 19(8) Citizenship Studies 936–950.

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 180 Tendayi Bloom

The changing relationship between residence and citizenship is tied also to a

global shift in approaches to dual and plural formal citizenship. Arguably, this also
represents a formalization of some aspects of the transnationalism identified in the
1990s,46 as well as an attempt to control the messy and mixed feelings that many
individuals, in fact, have of citizenship.47 Dual and plural formal citizenship have
long been seen as deviant and anomalous.48 It was assumed that a person could not
simultaneously have full allegiance to more than one country. The reality of
international migration, the need for gender equality in nationality law, and the
desire of states to engage with their diasporas have all contributed to a context in
which dual and plural citizenships are now accepted by many states and are
normalized on the international level, though this comes alongside localized con-
cerns regarding the loyalty that can be expected from dual or plural citizens.
As shown, relevant also is the global context in which the relationships between
states affect the nature of their citizenships and noncitizenships and the rights
associated with them. This means that even if everyone in the international com-
munity were a formal citizen of a recognized state, this would still not be enough to
ensure human rights for all. There are three main reasons.
First, in most states many formal citizens experience noncitizen relationships, in
some dimensions at least, with respect to their states of citizenship. This may result
from overt discrimination or from material poverty and other inequalities that make
it difficult for individuals to assert their citizenship.
The particularity of these individual–state relationships can be seen through the
illustrative case of Zambians in relation to other countries in the context of
extracting Zambian copper. Since 2008, the government of Zambia has led a series
of tax reforms to try to enforce higher tax burdens on copper mining companies
operating in the country. While tax money received as a result of these reforms is
higher than it had previously been, significant profits from copper extraction in
Zambia are made and remain outside the country.49 During the 1990s and early
2000s, and on the basis of recommendations from German and UK companies,

46
R. Rouse, “Mexican Migration and the Social Space of Postmodernism” (1991) 1(1) Diaspora:
A Journal of Transnational Studies 8–23; R. Bauböck, Transnational Citizenship: Membership
and Rights in International Migration (Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 1994).
47
A. Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 1999).
48
E.g., C. Joppke, “Citizenship between De- and Re-Ethnicization” (2003) 44 European Journal
of Sociology 429–458; T. Brondsted Sejersen, “‘I Vow to Thee My Countries’ – The Expansion
of Dual Citizenship in the 21st Century” (2008) 42(3) International Migration Review 523–549.
49
O. Lundstøl and J. Isaksen, “Zambia’s Mining Windfall Tax,” WIDER Working Paper 2018/51;
G. Zucman, The Hidden Wealth of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016). It is
also interesting to consider this in the context of discourse relating to Chinese involvement in
Zambian copper mining. See, e.g., H. Yan and B. Sautman, “‘The Beginning of a World
Empire’? Contesting the Discourse of Chinese Copper Mining in Zambia” (2013) 39(2)
Modern China 131–164.

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 Understanding Noncitizenship and Noncitizens 181

Zambia’s extraction industry was privatized and its taxation rates reduced.50 This
period also saw a 24 percent rise in unemployment and a decrease in Zambia’s
position in the Human Development Index from 110th in 1990 to 166th in 2005. This
led to a period of rethinking, including the Zambian civil society report “For whom
the windfalls.”51 The report expressed concern that Zambia’s resources, and so also
its ability to meet the needs of its citizens, were being lost to foreign companies.
I propose that this put each Zambian citizen also into a relationship with the
countries from which those companies operate and into which the wealth was
being funneled. This relationship was one of noncitizenship. It is particular and it
is rights generating.
Third, the language of noncitizenship helps to illustrate how citizenship itself can
constrain rights. This is seen particularly clearly in colonial and post-colonial
contexts. For example, while there are those in post-Soviet space who struggle for
citizenship, others struggle against particular citizenships or cannot explain their
relationships with existing states through citizenship alone.52 Consider, for example,
citizenship dynamics in the Crimea. Most recently, the Crimea was an autonomous
region of Ukraine until annexation by the Russian Federation in Spring 2014.
Although Crimeans were forcibly made Russian citizens, some retained their
Ukrainian citizenship. Officially, Ukraine does not allow dual citizenship (though
its Citizenship Law includes a provision for those who have not taken foreign
citizenship voluntarily). This has put individuals living in the Crimea at risk of
losing their Ukrainian citizenship, even if against their wishes. Some in the region
reject both Ukrainian and Russian citizenships in favor of citizenship of unilaterally
declared republics such as Donbass and Donetsk, which are not internationally
recognized, while others make strategic use of different citizenships in different
contexts.53 The terminology of noncitizenship alongside that of citizenship provides
a more nuanced way to explain these complex relationships.
Noncitizenship can help us to understand aspects of the international system that
cannot be easily described using the language of citizenship and of human rights
alone. However, while noncitizen rights are a distinct institutional category of rights,
in the world as it is, noncitizen relationships and citizen relationships interact and
affect each other. It is the existing states that are able to grant or withhold citizenship
from individuals. And it is the existing states that are able to recognize or not
recognize the citizenship-granting statehood of other political entities. This means

50
Lundstol and Isaksen, “Zambia’s Mining Windfall Tax,” pp. 5–8.
51
A. Fraser and J. Lungu, For Whom the Windfalls? Winners and Losers in the Privatisation of
Zambia’s Copper Mines (Lusaka, Zambia: CSNTZ/CCJDP, 2007).
52
K. Swider, “Why End Statelessness?,” in Bloom, Tonkiss, and Cole (eds.), Understanding
Statelessness.
53
N. Kasianenko, “Internal Legitimacy and Governance in the Absence of Recognition: The
Donetsk People’s Republic,” in Bloom and Kingston (eds.), Statelessness, Governance, and the
Problem of Citizenship.

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 182 Tendayi Bloom

that a system of rights that is purely citizen based reinforces existing structures of
international power and control and stifles dissent. Noncitizenship, then, and
noncitizen rights are also needed in order to liberate human rights and citizenship
from the risk of being coercive.

conclusion: understanding noncitizenship and

noncitizens in their own right
Human rights and citizen rights play important theoretical and practical roles in
ensuring basic needs are met and protected in the world as it is. But they are not
enough. This is because they fail to represent an important type of individual–state
relationship that has largely been left unacknowledged. Noncitizenship is a relation-
ship between an individual and a state that arises necessarily in the construction of
the modern state in a world of states. It arises when people find themselves living –
and flourishing – despite the state. This is theoretically important. It makes it
possible to recognize a crucial dimension of how people relate to states, and to
acknowledge the burden that this places upon them. It is also practically essential. It
provides the terminology necessary for challenging the dominance of citizenship in
framing basic rights and explaining that a relationship of contest between an
individual and a state is still a relationship in its own right
Recognizing this relationship and its role in the construction of the state chal-
lenges state legitimation stories. It problematizes the idea of a multistate system
constructed for those people who states wish to include in it, on terms set by states. It
is necessary either to justify the state to people in noncitizen relationships with it or
to defend why this justification is not needed. I suggest that this legitimacy challenge
generates particular rights claims against states and can help to drive a framing of
global justice that is based in relationships that are often obscured. The language of
noncitizenship and noncitizen rights helps to show how an individual could have
particular claims against a state even when either that state or the individual rejects
any relationship. It also makes it possible to examine how citizenships and non-
citizenships interact and the implications of this for rights. Finally, it provides a
vehicle for considering the implications for rights when citizenship itself is seen not
as emancipatory but as a constraint. A theory of noncitizen rights advocates holding
states accountable to those who bear the greatest burden for their existence, without
requiring those affected to contort themselves into citizen or quasi-citizen relation-
ships. It provides a way to understand noncitizens in their own right.

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