How do precarious communities enact citizenship? This paper proposes that existing studies, which focus on “practices” or “acts” of citizenship (Isin, 2008; Andrijasevic, 2013; Nyers, 2006; Walters, 2008), overlook the important role of silence in enacting citizenship. As such, this paper contends that silence—i.e., absence and revision in speech that often are intertwined with voice (Acheson, 2008; Jackson, 2012)—is rich with political power and agency. Silence both regenerates expressions of citizenship and political agency (Krause and Finn, 2018; Häkli and Kallio, 2014) as well as brings to life a politics that rarely is attributed to the imagination of the precarious. This paper finds that by connecting the political relevance of silence to its uses among precarious communities, we can unveil the political imagination of precarious communities and the “surpluses of citizenship” it produces. This contention is critical to capture how precarious communities can express “surplus” forms of citizenship that emit on a lower frequency and are not “fit” for the contexts that make them vulnerable but exist nonetheless. We unpack this argument by comparatively exploring the experiences of two precarious communities: Hizbollah activists in Iran and asylum-seekers in post-2015 Europe. This comparison draws on data collected by the authors through ethnography and participant observation with Hizbollah activists for two years between 2012 and 2014 in Iran and with asylum-seekers for six months between 2016 and 2017 in Greece. Overall, this paper responds to Lene Hansen’s (2019) call not to depict silence as a “heroic condition” but to imagine the world beyond dichotomies of act and silence. In doing so, our conception of “surpluses of citizenship” extends and challenges larger conversations about precarity and citizenship, both in and beyond the Middle East.

What does citizenship look like for protracted refugees in a host state? How do host states navigate the contradictions of such a long-term, or even effectively permanent, temporary status? What are the implications of long-term temporary statuses? This paper finds that states can disaggregate passport, nationality, and membership categories to respond more dynamically to protracted refugee situations. In turn, this disaggregation produces a spectrum of citizenship that can leave protracted refugees with ambiguous, “temporary” citizenship statuses for generations, which can include access to passports but not to nationality. This paper troubles rigid definitions of citizenship and finds that such definitions obscure the forms of membership and belonging held by groups who lack nationality but have lived in a host state for generations. Likewise, such definitions obscure state and global responsibility for protecting refugees, particularly from statelessness and access to education and healthcare. Altogether, ambiguities in citizenship and protracted temporariness produce capricious, disaggregated rights as well as more precarious lives for refugees. This paper uses Jordan’s extensive experience as a protracted refugee host state to examine its approach to citizenship, nationality, and passports for refugee groups over time. Jordan’s Palestinian refugees in particular provide an opportunity to study disjunctures in citizenship because Jordanian officials explicitly have framed policies toward them as temporary, even after fifty and seventy years. This analysis draws from extensive primary source data, including roughly 250 Jordanian laws, bylaws, and regulations, 800 files from the U.S. and British National Archives on Jordan’s internal affairs between 1946 and 1973, and 200 personal interviews with ministers, bureaucrats, and refugees, among others, conducted in Jordan between 2016 and 2019. Jordanian policies toward Palestinian refugee groups highlight how political uncertainty and promised temporariness can sustain spectrums of citizenship and ambiguous statuses. These findings extend and nuance research on noncitizenship and denizenship globally as well as challenge traditional definitions and boundaries of citizenship in the Arab world.

How can we better comprehend the ongoing demonstrations in Lebanon? Is the slogan “kellon ya‘ani kellon” (“all of them means all of them”) just a banner, or is it a rupture in the political history and imaginary of Lebanon? Drawing from the rich, emerging literature on citizenship in the Arab world, this paper interrogates the potential new, groundbreaking understandings and models of citizenship that have emerged from the ongoing October 17 revolution in Lebanon. It begins by tracing the development of the citizen-subject in Lebanon from the 19th century to the contemporary post-war period in order to elucidate explicitly the essence of the citizen-subject from a citizenship theory perspective. The analysis then proceeds to examine nascent reflections on citizenship and revolution that have appeared in newspapers, social media, public squares, and cultural productions since October 17, 2019. By considering how citizens accept, challenge, and propose new practices and models of citizenship, it becomes possible to see that past legacies either trigger, or are made themselves felt on, contemporary actions. The paper finds that a novel, non-sectarian model of citizenship is emerging in Lebanon—as seen when citizens participating in demonstrations performed and articulated their setting separate from institutionalized sectarian identifications to hold political leaders accountable. However, this paper also cautions that the emergence of this non-sectarian citizenship model alone is unlikely to overthrow the established citizenship regime in the immediate future. This reflects in part that the prevailing political system, which despite its incompetency, is something akin to a near-perfect dictatorship that has, in the words of activist Wadad Halwani, caused the notion of citizenship to “lose its meaning,” creating a long road ahead to reimagining and recreating citizenship across Lebanon.

Citizenship through investment and investment immigration programs have become a global trend. From Malta to Vanuatu, we have seen the emergence of a world where passports and citizenship are no longer restricted to parentage or historical belonging, but rather are available to those who can afford to pay the asking price. Even traditional immigrant receiving countries, such as Australia and Canada, have crafted deliberate policies in order to attract talented and hardworking immigrants. However, until recently, Persian Gulf states had avoided adopting such programs, or any other reforms that would expand their citizenries. This resistance occurred despite the Persian Gulf states representing the third largest hub of global migration as well as domestic tensions fomented by those denied access to citizenship. These states instead used citizenship as a prized, disciplining status that citizens could lose if they engaged in political activism, including in the aftermath of the Arab Spring. Despite this historic resistance to expanding access to citizenship, the United Arab Emirates (UAE) recently amended its nationality law to offer citizenship to select groups of foreigners. In addition, the changes in the Emirates go beyond typical investment citizenship programs because they do not offer citizenship strictly in return for investment alone. Instead, the changes allow the state to confer citizenship to “artists, scientists, doctors, innovators,” and those seen as bringing their talent and creativity to the country. These changes have gone forward despite opposition from some Emirati citizens, who have even directed rare, public criticism at the state in response to them. This paper asks what prompted UAE officials to adopt these reforms? Using UAE policy documents and referring to public statements the government has issued, this paper examines how these reforms have unfolded over the past five years. In doing so, it evaluates whether the economic logics that have motivated other states to adopt “conditional” investment citizenship programs also motivated the UAE’s decision, or whether UAE officials had broader strategic and political interests that prompted the policy changes. The paper also discusses the ethical and practical principles behind making citizenship contingent on specific attributes and behaviors. Overall, the paper contributes to and extends the growing literature on conditional citizenship by applying and interrogating these scholarly debates in the Arab world.