Halifax: Fernwood Publishing [distributed by Columbia University Press], 2024. US$33.00, paper. ISBN 9781773636665.
Statelessness—the fact of not being recognized as a citizen of any state—is not only a significant global human rights and development issue, but also a fundamental human condition in our world of nation states, affecting millions of people worldwide. In Ghost Citizens, Jamie Liew helps us understand the persistence of this phenomenon despite a decade-long campaign by the United Nations to eradicate statelessness.
In employing the concept of “ghost citizens,” the author draws attention to the underexplored practice in which states reconstruct stateless persons or even entire communities who live in their own home state, as not only foreigners but also as foreign citizens of other states. The “ghost citizen” is someone with genuine and long-standing links to their home, yet who is not recognized as a citizen of their home country. Liew explains the two sides of the concept as follows. On the one hand, the concept describes the “ghosting” of persons through the denial or even arbitrary deprivation of citizenship. On the other hand, states obscure the resulting statelessness by conferring “ghost citizenship” to stateless persons, presuming or declaring them to be citizens of other countries without evidence or documentary proof of that citizenship. The book makes a significant contribution to the emerging field of statelessness studies through an astute examination of the causes, conditions, and processes associated with the production of ghost citizens.
Indeed, in situ stateless persons, that is, those who are not on the move and were either born or have resided in countries where they have long-standing links, sometimes across generations, form the majority of the known global stateless population. It is telling that the UN High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that 75 percent of all stateless people belong to minorities. From Myanmar and the Dominican Republic to Assam in India, states resort to discriminatory practices that not only deny citizenship to people and communities with long-standing links to their territories, but they also turn citizens into foreigners, rendering them into a state of precariousness or even statelessness. The book joins a series of recent publications that have tried to tackle this phenomenon. Scholars have drawn attention to how states “manufacture” statelessness from among their own populations (Neha Jain, “Manufacturing Statelessness,” American Journal of International Law 116, no. 2, 2022; Michelle Foster and Jade Roberts, “Manufacturing Foreigners,” in Research Handbook on the Law and Politics of Migration, ed. Catherine Dauvergne, Elgar, 2021). This literature has looked at the issue from the perspective of the state by examining the laws, practices, and mechanisms that states employ when they produce statelessness. Liew complements this body of scholarship in Ghost Citizens by additionally drawing attention to the perspective of stateless people and their varied experiences of statelessness, drawing on rich ethnographical accounts and elevating the voices of the stateless through compelling narratives.
The site of Ghost Citizens is Malaysia. This choice is no coincidence. Firstly, Asia hosts the largest number of known stateless persons worldwide (Michelle Foster, Jaclyn Neo, and Christoph Sperfeldt, eds, Statelessness in Asia, Cambridge University Press, 2025). In 2024, the UNHCR estimated the number for Malaysia alone at almost 120,000. However, after reading the book, you will be forgiven for querying these official figures. Indeed, the very notion of the ghost citizen highlights the extent to which the problem remains invisible and cannot easily be captured through statistics. Secondly, the author brings to this book her own family history of stateless parents from neighbouring Brunei, which remains an ongoing problem in that country. This personal connection both to the topic and the region has benefitted the author’s research and clearly enriched her thoughtful and respectful reflections on the subjects and themes of the book.
The book traces across time and space how ghost citizens come into being and how they experience their reproduction as stateless individuals when they come into contact with the state’s laws and bureaucracies. The author begins by taking the reader on a journey into colonial history (chapter 2). Many protracted situations of statelessness in Asia have deep roots in countries’ colonial history, and Malaysia is no exception. Nationhood and citizenship are concepts popularized in the region by colonial powers. This process was closely associated with the classification of populations along ethnic and racial lines. Liew shows us how these identities were then reproduced in Malaysia’s postcolonial nation-building through discourses, laws, and policies, further entrenching “ghost citizens” as a continuous feature of society (chapters 3 and 4).
As a law scholar and legal practitioner in immigration and citizenship law, the author is at her best when she delves deep into the bureaucratic and administrative processes involved in the production of “ghost citizens” (chapter 6). In fact, it is more often than not the administrative practices of government officials that produce statelessness, rather than a state’s laws. In this process, stateless persons are frequently portrayed as not doing their administrative work, shifting the blame for the act of ghosting onto the ghosts. Liew’s penetrating analysis of what is happening at the “government counter” resonates with the work of scholars in other parts of Asia, such as India’s implementation of a National Register of Citizens in the state of Assam (Mohsin Alam Bhat, “(Un)Credible Citizen: Citizenship Dispossession, Documents and the Politics of the Rule of Law,” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 50, no. 19, 2024). And yet, the “ghost citizen” does not remain a passive or powerless figure; rather, the author also shows the survival work and resistance stateless people undertake when trying to claim recognition in their home country (chapter 7).
With Ghost Citizens, Liew has delivered an original, well-written, and thought-provoking account of how states produce the foreigner and the stateless from among people and communities with genuine and long-standing links to their country. Reading her book reminded me often of my own work on Cambodia’s Vietnamese minority, where stateless communities that have resided in the country for generations are depicted as perpetual “illegal immigrants” with Vietnamese “nationality,” without proof of such status (“Minorities and Statelessness: Social Exclusion and Citizenship in Cambodia,” International Journal on Minority and Group Rights 27, no. 1, 2020). By foregrounding the experiences of stateless persons, Liew invites us to question such labels and narratives. Ghost Citizens is a must-read for those wanting to obtain a fresh and insightful understanding of how states continuously reproduce the non-citizen “other” in Malaysia and in other parts of Asia and beyond.
Christoph Sperfeldt
Macquarie University, Sydney