Legal identity in a looking-glass world: documenting citizens of aspirant states

Abstract

This introductory article, and the additional 11 contributions that comprise this special issue of Citizenship Studies, uses political science, international law and anthropology literature to unmoor the primacy of the nation-state as the sole entity able to confer legal identity on individuals. It does this by examining legal identity documents, and their ramifications, in entities that exist physically but do not exist (entirely) legally or politically, what we term aspirant states. We find that doing so highlights that these aspirant states are not a set of problems to be redressed by integrating these anomalous spaces into the international order with better governance or juridical disambiguation. Rather, legal identity documents issued by aspirant states raise more fundamental questions about contemporary citizenship regimes in general and about the way law and state authority are constructed and reproduced. Such arguments force us to contest and reconsider the violent and circular logic of the current nation-state system and how legal identity, and citizenship, is conferred and maintained.