Life-cycle documentation issued by old and new states, between real and make-believe

Abstract

Speaker – Marika Sosnowski, German Institute for Global and Area Studies Discussant – Cindy Wittke, Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Politics This paper examines how the tripartite relationship – between the state, the law and people – is unsettled and contested in civil war environments through the issuance of life-cycle event documentation (such as birth, death and marriage certificates) by actors other than the old, established state. It does this in the context of one of the most critical conflicts of our time, the Syrian civil war. Since the uprising in 2011 and subsequent civil war began in Syria in 2012, a range of actors have set up new states, developed legal systems and provided life-cycle documentation to people living within the areas they control in order to claim them as citizens. To analyse this so far vastly under-researched phenomenon, this article provides a conceptual discussion of this practice, backed up by empirical data, along three different, but complementary, lines of enquiry that all materially manifest in life-cycle documents: the performative nature of the state; the order-making abilities of the law; and, people caught in citizenship constellations. While a great deal of work has already been done to explain the tenuous, yet resilient, foundations upon which all nation-states rest, these three threads shift our gaze away from the obvious places where power is promulgated and enforced to elucidate how life-cycle documentation can be used to both undermine and support these structures.

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Life-cycle documentation issued by old and new states, between real and make-believe	View Paper Details