The Crémieux Decree of 1870 did more than endow Algerian Jews with French citizenship; it stripped them of their indignity, first under the law of colonial power and ultimately in the view of Algerian Muslim society, which remained indigène.This paper explores, from a legal and sociological perspective, the performative-constitutive uses of citizenship by national communities in the region pursuing self-determination in its various forms, as well as the role of citizenship in thwarting those national ambitions by dividing and disfiguring the ‘nation’. International law is famously thin on questions of nationality. This is a double-edged sword. States in Russia’s orbit are vexed by the problem that passportization – as distinguished from the compulsory acquisition of an occupying power’s citizenship – does not obviously violate any accepted principle of international law. These states are left to protest by appeal to indeterminate legal concepts such as abuse of rights. But for semi-recognised ‘virtual states’ such as Palestine and the Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic which claim diasporic populations as their citizenry, this legal lacuna is an opportunity: passportization may help legitimise the ‘virtual state’ as a home state or kin state endowing its putative citizens with rights and obligations, thereby restoring ties frayed by fragmentation and the passage of time, restoring a sense of political belonging, and reinforcing the collective’s claim for return. In other words, passportization may facilitate the internal dimensions of statehood even as the external dimension remain frustrated. This paper builds on the concepts of liminality in contested state citizenship (Krasniqi, 2019) and citizenship constellations of contested states, recognised states, kin states, and patron states vying for the polity’s legal and emotional allegiance (Bauböck, 2010). In addition to the performative-constitutive potential of citizenship for Palestinians and Sahrawis, the paper examines situations in which the community exercising control over a contested space has refused, offered, or imposed its citizenship as a way of excluding, fragmenting, or assimilating dispossessed, native or minority communities. Its case studies include the denial of Republic of Cyprus citizenship to Cypriot children of Turkish origin, Israeli citizenship practices towards Palestinian residents of Jerusalem since 1967, Morocco’s imposition of citizenship on Sahrawis in Western Sahara and its use of citizenship to court Frente Polisario defectors.

The Syrian refugee crisis remains the world’s most compelling humanitarian challenge over a decade after it began, even as the emerging Gaza refugee crisis is urgent and pressing. With nearly 5.6 million refugees registered through the UNHCR across the region as of late 2023, the Syrian crisis has highlighted failures of state governance. Moreover, it has encouraged ad hoc and negotiated working networks of transnational and local groups. most notably the Jordan Compact and the Regional Refugee and Resilience Plan (3RP). Such arrangements represent efforts at providing innovative governance to stateless people in areas that, if stable, are only partially managed by state authority. This paper looks at existing and emerging refugee governance regimes in the MENA in terms of the panel’s broader themes of Specifically, through focused analysis of the experience and evolution of Syrian refugee governance in Jordan, with some reference to Lebanon and Turkey, as well as to UNWRA and Gaza, I consider the following: (1) What lessons of possible relevance to alternative sovereignty does mixed NGO-state-private sector governance in refugee camps provide about authority and governance where state control is minimal or liminal? (2) How important has refugees’ own political agency been, when they have little or no citizenship rights in the areas in which they live? (3) What do the failures of refugee governance suggest more broadly for alternative sovereignties in the MENA, and particularly regional order? I address these questions using previous work and writing I have done on governance and the refugee crisis, as well as the parallels for challenges to and limitations of state sovereignty in the MENA with respect to the large numbers of non-citizen migrants in Arab Gulf societies. I argue that failures of governance and meeting services for large numbers of non-citizen migrants and refugees both illustrates and accelerates the contemporary empirical failures of MENA states and the need for alternative ideas around politics, especially enhanced regionalism. More specifically, regional regimes offer modest hope for improving the suboptimal record of both MENA states and the global order on challenging governance issues that span multiple societies. This paper builds on my training as a lawyer, political scientist and policy scholar. It advances my prior work, and nearly $1.1 million in funding, on legal contestation in five Arab countries, and a pilot grant to develop a global group of scholars to compare and refine regional approaches to refugee governance.

This paper examines concepts and approaches explored in confederal proposals developed in the Kurdish and Palestinian contexts. Ideas about confederalism have germinated in the Kurdish national movement for two decades and resulted in a surprising experiment in Syria, which permits for the first time an empirical investigation of these ideas. In the Israeli-Palestinian context, policy proposals for binational confederalism have garnered new interest since October 7th. We believe that comparing ideas about confederalism — as a vehicle for expressing national self-determination without the formal attributes of statehood — in these two disparate cases yields important insights. Both sets of proposals leave open important questions about how to connect potential (or actual) confederal projects to existing state structures or how, in practice, to transform state institutions in ways that make them more conducive to realizing confederal futures. On the other hand, there are also critical insights about the status of borders, citizenship, residency rights and democratic representation in both sets of proposals that reconfigure the relationship between political authority and territory in ways that are generative, precisely because they sidestep the methodological and conceptual binds of the nation-state. The paper makes a contribution to the literatures in comparative politics and comparative law that address questions of constitutional design in divided societies, internal and external self-determination, and non-sovereign nations of the MENA region.

The century-long conflict over Israel-Palestine both highlights the trouble caused by the introduction of the nation-state in the Middle East and the reasons it retains some allure, including the promise of security, belonging, and access to the privileges of membership in the community of states. Does ending the conflict require us to reimagine the relationship between nation, state and territory? Confederal proposals such as « A Land for All » and « The Holy Land Confederation » suggest that it does, but their visions differ from each other in important ways. This paper will explore how they reconceptualize the nation-state, tracing the ways their visions differ from each other and from more conventional Zionist and Palestinian nationalist approaches. The paper will then turn to considering two crucial questions raised by these proposals. First, to what extent would each state be ethnicized or « dyed in a nation’s color » (Wimmer, 2002)? Drawing on comparative experience, the paper will consider the appropriate constraints on laws privileging certain ethnic groups in relation to language, immigration and naturalization, access to voting rights, governmental services, benefits, and positions. Second, to what extent would an Israeli-Paelstinian confederation define norms and establish institutions that safeguard the rights of minorities in each member state? Commitments to minority rights – entrenched in constitutional provisions and/or in international commitments – have come to be seen as critical to the stability of new political configurations in divided societies. But their uneven success suggests the need for mechanisms of adjudication and enforcement beyond just a stated commitment – especially in a context where Israeli Jewish settlers make their home in a Palestinian state and Palestinian refugees make theirs in an Israeli state. The potential for discrimination is strong, and giving national judiciaries full responsibility for minority protection could subject courts to political pressures that challenge their legitimacy no matter how they rule. A supranational court could both safeguard minority rights and help to keep the peace. With regard to the design of such an institution, the paper will consider what lessons may be drawn from models such as the European Court of Human Rights and the Constitutional Court of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Archives of the Iraqi Ba’th regime and the Kurdish national movement between 1970 and 2003 show that both entities began to step up their attempts to gain international attention by using the language and bureaucracy of human rights in the 1990s, though only the Kurdish nationalist movement could claim undisputed success in garnering support for its goals. This chapter recounts how the Kurdish nationalist movement in Iraq struggled for years to publicize the atrocities being committed against the Kurdish population there and was repeatedly rebuffed or silenced by a postcolonial Iraq until after the Gulf War. The war was a major windfall that paved the way for their autonomy and gave human rights researchers access to the region, along with a trove of evidence of Iraqi crimes. Within the same period, Iraq under the Ba’th regime had become isolated and struggled to publicize the effects of harsh international sanctions, particularly against the nation’s children. Both parties tried to garner support for their goals in this way, though in the end only the Kurdish national movement achieved some level of success. This paper includes research in the Ba’th Archives at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, the Omar Sheikhmous archives at the University of Exeter, as well as United Nations archives and other material available online. It also includes some oral histories with members of the Kurdish diaspora in the U.S., U.K. and Sweden.

Since 2011 Lebanon hosts more than a million displaced Syrians fleeing from a devastating civil war. This humanitarian crisis directly questions the political economy of solidarity in municipalities of the Bekaa valley welcoming displaced populations. In the Levant solidarity is customarily practiced as an act of “hospitality” from a “host” to a “guest”. But the Lebanese government also delegated the management of the emergency crisis to international humanitarian actors. Therefore, this article exposes how newcoming International Non-Governmental Organisations (INGOs) destabilised the tradition of hospitality in villages of the Bekaa by hampering the latter’s legitimacy in preserving the pre-existing social order. This research then reveals how some Lebanese mayors successfully exploited INGOs’ mishandling of the humanitarian response to rebalance the political economy of solidarity in their favour. Encouraged by the state administration, many mayors emulated corrupt practices from the national elites to blackmail some compliant INGOs. In fear of being evicted, several INGOs ceded to the mayors demands and involuntarily unleashed an anarchic competition of resource predation. These mayors thus instrumentalised “hospitality” into a clientelist rent perpetuating their political dominance. Conclusively, this research emphasises the importance for international NGOs to “localise” emergency programming with experienced local NGOs to avoid fueling traditional structures of corruption. The research findings presented in this article are extracted from original mixed sources of data collected in 2018 and 2019 in municipalities of the Bekaa valley hosting displaced Syrians. It includes the testimonies of 78 elite-interviewees, among them Lebanese politicians, humanitarian actors, and religious leaders, who shape the political economy of solidarity in their community. These narratives are complemented by interviews with Lebanese/foreign experts of migration issues. In addition 146 Lebanese and displaced participants responded to two sets of surveys gathering data on their livelihoods in the governorates of Baalbek-Hermel and Bekaa.