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Jamie Chai Yun Liew is a professor, lawyer, novelist and podcaster. She is the co-author of Immigration Law and Immigration and Refugee Law: Cases, Material, and Commentary. She teaches, researches and writes on immigration, refugee and citizenship law, and how law not only marginalizes people but constructs them as racialized and foreign.

For issue #143 of The Internationalist, we excerpt from her book, Ghost Citizens: Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law. In this extract, she explains how the ontology of "ghost citizens" reframes statelessness not as a lack of identity but as a deliberate state-constructed condition of non-existence, used to ostracize and deny the rights of those with deep, tangible connections to a nation.

The ontology of the term ghost citizens allows us to think about statelessness and citizenship differently. First, understanding some stateless persons as ghost citizens allows us to recognize the labels imposed on stateless persons. These labels include foreigner, stranger, illegal, and deviant. Some stateless persons claim they are de facto citizens with genuine, long-standing, effective, and enduring connections to the state. The turn to deem them ghost citizens acts as a reminder to prioritize the experiences and voices of stateless persons and to highlight the impact of law and policy on them.

Second, the identification of stateless persons as ghost citizens gives us the language to upset or disturb narratives about stateless persons. Primarily, stateless persons are denied their own existence and are told that statelessness is a benign, minor, or isolated problem that should be dealt with on a case-by-case basis. The existence of ghost citizens allows us to point to deliberate state action to depict stateless persons as Others. Ghost citizens’ lived experiences not only illustrate the conscious denial of the dignity and the very existence of stateless persons, but also how the sufferings of stateless persons are clearly known to those who have the power to eradicate statelessness. The belief that if the state knew exactly what was going on it would make changes is contradicted by the experiences of stateless persons.

Further, ghost citizens provide us with the language to call out questionable findings of facts made with little or no evidence. Recognizing how ghost citizens are constructed raises awareness of the problematic practices of taking judicial notice of one’s presumed citizenship and the making of speculative findings about the assumed citizenship of a person. Given international law’s definition of statelessness and its turn to legal conferral as proof of one’s citizenship, this specious practice should be interrogated, critiqued, and challenged before it becomes more entrenched as a legal or state practice. Beyond the findings of fact, the praxis of finding ghost citizens also points to the problematic approach of demanding the preliminary step stateless persons must take for their applications to be examined on their merits. The steps stateless persons are directed to take include applying for citizenship in another country where there is only a slight opportunity for entitlement to citizenship. This requirement is characterized in law as exhausting one’s remedies or seeking alternative remedies. Whatever the case, they are legal devices meant to distract a decision maker from the task at hand, which is to examine the claim before them. It makes the assumptions that all that is needed is the regularization of status with the “proper” state identified documents, and takes for granted the fact that alternative states will see such persons as their citizen and will welcome them.

The term ghost citizens should not be applied universally to all stateless persons or essentialize experiences of stateless persons. Using ghost citizens as an ontology should not contribute to further marginalize migrants who may or may not be stateless. Recognizing stateless persons as non-migrants should not provide fodder for the exclusion or ill treatment of migrants. The device of deeming stateless people ghost citizens is meant for us to consider the experience of some in situ stateless persons, those within their “own” or “home” country. Rather than dividing in situ stateless persons from migrant stateless persons, the conception of the ghost citizen invites further investigation as to the experiences of stateless persons within a variety of contexts and further thinking in identifying and understanding occurrences of statelessness. In doing so, the perspective of the stateless persons should be placed at the forefront.

The incidents of statelessness in situ are important to study and explore. There is an urgency to understanding the manufacturing of statelessness in postcolonial states that might not adhere to human rights regimes. The stripping of citizenship from Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and the Assamese in India reveal a concerning trend of the creation of statelessness as a method to mark persons as not only Others but as foreigners. In these contexts, the turn to statelessness reinforces, encourages, and justifies the oppression experienced by these racialized communities and have led to disturbing state behaviour that is now being examined in international legal venues. The creation, maintenance, and justification for statelessness and understanding this process can inform how we may acquire evidence and prosecute international humanitarian crimes like genocide and forced displacement, for example.

Excerpted with permission from Ghost Citizens: Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law by Jamie Chai Yun Liew, published by Fernwood Publishing, 2025.

The Internationalist Archive