The making of procedural justice: enacting the state and (non)citizenship

Abstract

Recent advances in citizenship and migration studies have demonstrated the need to explore noncitizens’ social, political and legal relationships to the state in their own right. Such a rethinking inevitably requires analysing how both ‘citizenship’ and ‘the state’ are enacted and performed in the negotiation of substantive rights. This special issue follows an unexplored path by scrutinizing these interactions between ‘citizenship’ and ‘stateness’ in the domain of procedural law, procedural safeguards, and perceptions of procedural justice among a variety of actors. The contributions explore empirically how procedural rules are invoked, altered, disregarded, or reinvented in different sites of interaction, ranging from asylum determination and adjudication to immigration and municipal registration offices. This interactionist approach not only recasts procedural rules as an integral part of citizenship struggles, thereby shedding light on the co-constitution of state and noncitizenship, but also stresses the importance of nuanced analyses of the nexus between procedural and substantive rights.