Seeing like the stateless: Documentation and the mobilities of liminal citizenship in Cambodia

Abstract

King's College LondonThis paper explores de facto statelessness amongst ethnically Vietnamese communities in Cambodia. It demonstrates that the inaccessibility of citizenship rights is not rooted directly in what documents an individual possesses, but in collective mobilities driven by a combination or past and present and potential risks. Specifically, the reluctance of officials to replace documents for those they perceive not to be ethnically Khmer means that even ethnically Vietnamese Cambodians possessing a full set of documents -and who have never crossed a border -are encouraged to pursue similar mobilities to those who have none, including first generation immigrants. The higher level of environmental risk associated with these ethnically mediated, informal livelihoods further reduces these households' stocks of physical documentation, inducing a reliance on social networks that are vulnerable to evictions and harassment.On this basis, this paper proposes the category of liminal statelessness, in order to better conceptualize a situation in which people with different legal statuses and abilities to prove them share livelihoods characterized by the non-exercise of citizenship rights. its aftermath -has left their communities with a patchwork of documentation whose impacts are felt across generations. For those thus afflicted, citizenship is therefore not an absolute state, but a question of degree (Ang et al., 2014;Sperfeldt and Nguyen, 2012), rooted more in the everyday judgments of ethnicity enacted by officials than such abstractions as legal status and entitlement. Statelessness for ethnically Vietnamese populations is therefore continually re-entrenched by shared practices of mobility which help to circumvent these forms of administrative marginality, but also mark out those who undertake them as subject to uncertain citizenship. Referred to here as collective mobilities, these practices of movement become a key form of distinction between those whose legal status is secure and those whose isn't.These everyday, practiced, nuances of statelessness are, however, little noted in a literature dominated by legalistic frameworks, leaving the full 'complexity and gravity of the problem of statelessness' (Van Waas, 2009: 133) underexplored. In particular, the category of 'de facto' statelessness remains unclearly delineated, especially in its relationship to limited or ineffective citizenship. This paper therefore proposes the category of liminal statelessness, a conceptualization that focuses on the gray areas between citizenship and statelessness, in order to highlight the multiple heterogenous factors beyond documentation and legal status that combine to influence interaction between communities and the state.After outlining the theoretical, methodological and empirical background to the study, the paper will use data from an ethnographic, multi-sited, study to present this argument in three parts. First, it will highlight the articulated nature of exclusion faced by ethnically Vietnamese communities in C...

The Subjective Climate Migrant: Climate Perceptions, Their Determinants, and Relationship to Migration in Cambodia

“…Brick workers and their households are characterized by multidimensional marginality rooted in their poverty, lack of assets, and the social stigma attached to their work. Beggars suffer social exclusion and poverty (Beazley and Miller 2015;Springer 2017; Parsons and Lawreniuk 2018; Parsons 2019), and Vietnamese communities are characterized by physical and social marginality, as well as political exclusion (Berman 1996;Amer 2013;Sperfeldt 2017;Parsons and Lawreniuk 2018;Canzutti 2019). From the perspective that marginality is coconstituted by natural environmental, economic, and social factors (Von Braun and Gatzweiler 2014; Chu and Michael 2019), the three groups were also selected on the basis of their geographical concentration in (and historical association with) parts of Cambodia characterized by ecological and environmental precarity.…”

Qualitative methods I: On current conventions in interview research

“…Implicit in doing so is the suggestion that they not only present instantiations of the argument but also ‘give voice’ to the often otherwise unexamined views of those being researched – highlighting the overlooked expertise that such interviewees evidently possess. Parsons and Lawreniuk (2018), for example, in their study of Vietnamese migrants in Cambodia provide an exemplary case of quotes being used to enliven and make concrete more general descriptive narratives. What was also notable was how, though the experts are generally seen to state the facts of the matters as they see it, with those who are framed as non-experts by their researchers, the verbs used to preface quotes – if they are prefaced at all – have a less declarative tone.…”

Legal geographies of neoliberalism: Market-oriented tenure reforms and the construction of an ‘informal’ urban class in post-socialist Phnom Penh

“…Eventually, these settlements are ‘whitened’, as discourses are mobilised that invoke neoliberal concepts of ‘development’ or a need to protect the ‘national interest’, or ‘blackened’ through evictions (Yiftachel, 2009: 93). (See Parsons and Lawreniuk, 2018, for a discussion on the legal and discursive framing of Vietnamese Cambodians as ‘liminal’ citizens. )…”