Theorizing Omission: State Strategies for Withholding Official Recognition of Personhood

Abstract

This article theorizes “omission,” which I define as the condition of being left out of administrative apparatuses, such as civil registers, censuses, and identity management systems. According to this theory, omission is not necessarily accidental but can constitute a political strategy. When even excluded statuses can be powerful grounds for claiming rights, resources, or membership, state actors can subvert such claims-making potential by depriving unwanted populations of the practical, material capacity to establish their legal personhood through documents and records. To situate omission, I develop a typology of documentary strategies additionally comprising “recognition,” “claims-making,” and “evasion.” Although my theorizing is informed by ethnographic research with unregistered families in Malaysia, scholars can apply this typology to multiperspectival, relational analyses of other empirical cases of documentary politics. Studying omissions has scholarly and ethical imperatives, not least to record the lives of populations denied, at times with existential consequences, the right to recognition.

Racial Exclusion by Bureaucratic Omission: Non-Enumeration, Documentary Dispossession, and the Rohingya Crisis in Myanmar

“…The exercise of updating the register is a continuation, within the administrative domain, of longstanding colonially-inflected struggles to define Assamese indigeneity against Muslim Bengali Otherness. Instances of racial exclusion via bureaucratic omission may continue to occur in a world in which human rights instruments and institutions provide even subjugated and marginalized persons with the capacity to claim rights and recognition on the bare basis of personhood (Cheong 2023).…”

“…By withholding access to official recognition, state actors can undermine people's claims-making capacities, given that even marginalized and subjugated identities can be turned into symbolic grounds for mobilization from below (Caplan and Torpey 2001;Marx 1995). State actors can maintain willful ignorance on paper to the existence of unwanted populations in order to deny recognition of, and therefore any obligations to, those which they seek to exclude (Cheong 2023).…”

“…Specifically, I address why state actors might opt to omit racially unwanted populations from the state's purview, rather than bring them under bureaucratic control. To do so, I extrapolate from a particular theorizing of "omission" that I have begun in Cheong (2023), in which I define omission as the process of "being left out of state's administrative apparatuses" (herein specified as "bureaucratic omission"). In this work, I argue that the state's strategic abstention from expanding its administrative reach can also constitute a mode of symbolic power accumulation.…”

“…Indeed, Marx (1995) describes racial domination itself as "two-edged," arguing that the "exclusion of officially specified groups has the unintended consequence of defining, legitimating, and provoking group identity and mobilization, forging struggles for inclusion between state agents and emerging political actors" (p. 159). Thus, even being legally or administratively designated as an stigmatized or excluded category can be powerful grounds for claims-making (Voss and Bloemraad 2011), and it is this claims-making potential which I argue can be pre-empted via bureaucratic omission (Cheong 2023).…”