In the conventional view, citizenship is a binary whose dividing line is readily located. Although some citizenship rules are complex, they are approached in the manner of puzzles. A limited number of facts—when and where an individual was born and to which parents—is supposed to supply an answer. This seems especially apparent in the context of territorial birthright citizenship regimes (known as jus soli, or right of the soil), under which the place of birth by itself establishes a citizenship claim. But even citizenship based on descent (jus sanguinis, or right of the blood) is governed by bright-line rules, typically contingent on the citizenship status of the parent. Citizenship laws put down precise metrics for citizenship determinations. When it comes to citizenship, you either have it or you do not.

Alas, it is not always so easy. Individual status determinations all imply evidentiary requirements. One has to show that one was born on this side of the border or that one’s parents satisfied conditions for citizenship in order to descend. That requires documentation or other forms of evidence. In most cases, that evidence is easily produced. If you have a genuine birth certificate from a hospital in New York City, for example, you are not going to have much trouble demonstrating an entitlement to U.S. citizenship. If you are born to a hill tribe in remote areas of northern Thailand, you may.

It is cases like the Thai hill tribes that are the subject of this excellent and timely interdisciplinary collection, edited by Benjamin N. Lawrance and Jacqueline Stevens, which examines a range of contexts in which citizenship is put into question. Citizenship in Question looks at citizenship beyond the sanitized world of citizenship law. As Kamal Sadiq puts it in his contribution to the project, “state papers, documents, and formats tell us more about membership, nationality, belonging, and identity than formal rules alone” (p. 167). There are an estimated 40 million unregistered births every year (p. 35). Lack of documentation (or the refusal of states to recognize certain forms of documentation) gives rise to effective statelessness. “Without the proper state artifacts,” Sadiq notes, “these individuals are unable to claim rights from the state, and they remain hidden from state welfare specifically designed to help them” (p. 173).

Unsurprisingly, the phenomenon is a greater problem in the Global South. Amanda Flaim recounts the difficult work of documenting members of the hill tribes living in physically inaccessible and culturally remote villages in northern Thailand. Government census surveyors sometimes fail to locate the isolated communities. When they do, communication is severely obstructed by language barriers. Some officials do their job the best they can in challenging circumstances; others are less dutiful. When individuals lacking birth or residency documentation attempt to establish their citizenship, the lack of evidence “must ultimately be bridged by beliefs” of adjudicating officials (p. 163). Polly Price describes effective statelessness caused by a lack of documentation in the Americas, a particular problem among indigenous populations. Alfred Babo addresses the political abuse of citizenship barriers in the Ivory Coast, where the concept of “ivoirité” is used to deny citizenship to individuals in the north of the country who are less likely to be able to demonstrate necessary national lineages. (Although it does not implicate deprivations in the same way as other contributions, Sara L. Friedman’s chapter on the documentary contortions incident to the migration of mainland Chinese women to Taiwan to marry Taiwanese men makes a fascinating contribution.)

The phenomenon is not limited to less-developed countries where state capacity is often lacking, however. Jacqueline Bhabha describes the citizenship plight of the Roma in Europe, many of whom lack birth and residency documentation. That evidentiary deficit enables discriminatory tendencies among state officials. Despite valid claims to citizenship, she writes, “state authorities persist in not crediting their documents or narratives as bona fide evidence of citizenship entitlement” (p. 53). Rachel Rosenbloom considers obstacles faced by borderland Mexican Americans in proving citizenship where birth occurs not in hospitals but with the assistance of midwives. “[A] birth certificate only has the power that it is accorded by the state” (p. 143); the State Department maintains a list of “suspect birth attendants” (at one point numbering 249) whose certifications of birth have to be validated by additional evidence. (The “racialized presumptions of fraud” [p. 133] bring to mind recent episodes involving passport denials to dual Yemeni-American citizens resident in Yemen.) Beatrice McKenzie adds a historical perspective, describing the extreme scrutiny to which Chinese immigrants were subjected in establishing their entitlement to entry rights. On the way to proving birth in the United States, for example, one Chinese American was asked 150 questions by U.S. immigration inspectors in an attempt to discredit a citizenship claim (p. 124).

The case studies in this volume present a significant human rights challenge. Many elements of the welfare state continue to be contingent on citizenship status, as of course are residency rights and insulation from deportation. There is clearly a citizenship ceiling in most of the world’s countries today in terms of limited earnings capacity and social standing. Some of the authors have themselves worked as advocates for the putatively stateless individuals and communities about which they have written for the volume, which makes for an engaged perspective. But the material also presents a conceptual challenge to the naturalized perspective on citizenship. As Stevens puts it in her eloquent introduction, the case studies “reveal that we are not citizens in the ways we often imagine we are, as if we were born this way without the state, as though being born Portuguese or Pakistani is the same as being born with brown or green eyes” (p. 7). Citizenship is, of course, a construct, established and maintained by states. In some cases, denial of citizenship (through denial of necessary documentation) is a weapon. In other cases, it demonstrates the limits of state control.

The stakes are high, both in terms of the theory and the practice. Although citizenship no longer sustains the peremptory importance of an Arendtian perspective—human rights now supplies a floor in the treatment of those who are stateless—it remains important. Citizenship is also increasingly arbitrary. Why should the child born in El Paso get U.S. citizenship when it is denied the child born in Juarez? But citizenship may be in trouble even on its own terms. Citizenship allocations may seem as neatly drawn as lines on the map of the world. As this volume demonstrates, there are many contexts in which they are hardly that.