It is hard to write a review of a historical book when it feels so urgently relevant to the present. The bureaucracy of citizenship – earned and given, removed and conditioned through the “dry rules” of files, categories, and checklists – remains very much alive. It still shapes how we inhabit space and belonging, both in the Middle East and across other postcolonial states. In Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship, Berda offers a breathtakingly precise account of how administrative routines, rather than grand political decisions, became the very mechanisms through which empire was governed and postcolonial states were imagined. Her achievement is to make visible how ordinary bureaucrats – through forms, registries, and permits – created the very political order they appeared merely to implement.
Berda’s argument reverses the usual story of empire and its aftermath. It was not that policy dictated bureaucratic practice; bureaucracy itself produced policy, logic, and law. Through meticulous archival work on British colonial administrations in India, Palestine/Israel, and Cyprus, she shows that what held these empires together was not the coherence of imperial vision but the everyday discretion of clerks and district officers. The racialized “hybrid bureaucracy” of the late empire – simultaneously Weberian and personal, rule-bound and improvisational – did not merely carry out decisions from above. It generated its own categories of loyalty, danger, and belonging, which then hardened into the legal frameworks of the postcolonial states that did not abolish the imperial order.
At the center of this system stood what Berda calls an axis of suspicion – a bureaucratic way of seeing that classified entire populations along a sliding scale from loyal to disloyal, from governable to threatening. This administrative gaze, structured by emergency laws and racial hierarchies, allowed the empire to govern through constant exception while maintaining the façade of legality. The end of the imperial rule did not abolish this order: it nationalized it. The same files, forms, and personnel carried forward the imperial habit of suspicion into the new states, transforming bureaucratic technique into the foundation of postcolonial citizenship. Bureaucracy, in Berda’s account, was not the instrument of policy but its author: it created the state’s fears, its categories of people, and its moral geography. This historical argument resonates well beyond the specific cases. Its conceptual language – “axis of suspicion,” “bureaucratic toolkit of emergency,” “permit regimes” – provides a vocabulary for the enduring rationalities that animate modern bureaucracies.
Berda’s account of bureaucracy as a producer of politics rather than its servant opens a way to think about how suspicion travels across state forms. If, in the colonial and postcolonial context, bureaucratic suspicion organized populations through mobility and loyalty, in the welfare state, it organizes them through dependency and productivity. Both regimes transform vulnerability into suspicion, and both make belonging conditional upon administrative trust. While the postcolonial state feared the movement of undesired bodies into or across its space, the welfare state fears their concentration. Both deny mobility, but in opposite directions.
In the postcolonial bureaucracies Berda describes, suspicion is territorial. It is directed at those whose movement might disturb political geography – refugees returning home, migrants crossing partition lines, minorities relocating within the nation. Bureaucratic instruments such as permits, blacklists, and mobility restrictions work to immobilize: to fix people to places or keep them out altogether. Suspicion seeks to stabilize borders, to freeze what the empire once set in motion.
By contrast, suspicion in the welfare state operates through dispersal. The poor, too, are objects of suspicion, but the danger they pose is not territorial infiltration – it is visibility and aggregation. When poverty becomes spatially concentrated, it risks becoming political; when it is dispersed, it can be moralized. Welfare bureaucracies therefore work not to confine but to scatter: through housing policies that relocate families, welfare-to-work programs that individualize responsibility, and case-management systems that translate structural need into personal failure. Suspicion thus shifts from guarding borders to guarding the moral economy. This transition carries a deeper political-economic meaning. Much like the colonial legacy of divide-and-rule, dispersal reproduces a capitalist order grounded in hyper-individualism. Fragmentation becomes both a method of control and an ideological necessity for a system that depends on isolating responsibility and dissolving solidarity. The bureaucratic suspicion that once managed colonial subjects is now deployed to manage surplus citizens, ensuring that poverty remains a personal misfortune rather than a collective injustice.
Berda’s narrative also opens a window onto what we might call the political economy of utility – the quiet current running beneath the louder rhetoric of emergency. In the colonial archive, crises justified everything: every decree, every extension of power, every act of classification. But behind the language of threat and necessity lay a simpler calculus – who is useful to us, and who is not. The same grammar endures today, inverted but familiar, in postcolonial welfare regimes. Here, loyalty is performed through compliance rather than collaboration: the poor must demonstrate usefulness to the state through employability, gratitude, or docile participation in programs that monitor and discipline them. Welfare becomes conditional upon performance; citizenship becomes a reward for utility. Suspicion and productivity thus form the two halves of a single moral economy, one that survived the end of empire and quietly governs the administration of compassion.
Lastly, suspicion, whether colonial or capitalist, also rests on epistemic hierarchies. Berda reveals how bureaucracies classified people through files and forms, but law and courts have sustained these hierarchies by legitimizing bureaucratic knowledge. Administrative agencies’ “data” and categories are continually pitted against oral testimony and narrative. The contest between the file and the story – between bureaucratic record and lived experience – is where epistemic injustice materializes. Refugees, immigrants, and welfare recipients alike are forced to narrate their lives within bureaucratic templates that presuppose deceit.
Berda notes that she sought to “step away from law” and give bureaucracy the driver’s seat. Yet in common law jurisdictions, law constantly steers bureaucratic action through petitions, advocacy, and judicial review. Courts have adopted the Weberian imagination of administration as neutral, efficient, and non-political. This judicial embrace of the Weberian ideal cements the perception that bureaucracies are mere instruments of legality, rather than political actors that shape space, belonging, and distribution. The result is an epistemic hierarchy in which bureaucratic “facts” enjoy presumptive truth while human stories are treated as unreliable. Legality itself becomes a shelter for suspicion.
Seen together, the colonial and welfare regimes form a continuous genealogy of bureaucratic suspicion. In both, suspicion begins with group markers – race, religion, geography, language, class – traits that “jump-start” administrative doubt. Belonging to a category places one under surveillance before any action is taken. Yet once suspicion is triggered, bureaucracy operates through the individual: each case file, each interview, each inspection produces a personalized justification for what is already a collective presumption. In the colonial and postcolonial setting, the danger was coded as disloyalty or potential violence; in the welfare state, as idleness or non-productivity. Both demand that suspicion be verified person by person, even when it is collectively presumed. This combination – a categorical origin and individualized execution – is what gives bureaucratic suspicion its durability. It enables institutions to deny discrimination while reproducing it, translating prejudice into the neutral language of procedure and proof.
Ultimately, Berda’s book reminds us that bureaucracy is not an administrative layer atop politics; it is one of politics’ most enduring engines. Its categories do not mirror reality; they manufacture it. And if the colonial file and the welfare file look so similar, it is because both remain bound to the same promise of order through suspicion – a promise that transforms vulnerability into risk and difference into deviation. To study bureaucracy, as Berda urges, is therefore to study the law’s most tenacious embodiment, and to recognize that suspicion has not ended with empire; it has simply come home.
