Ghost Citizens is about in
situ stateless people, persons who live in a country they consider
their own but which does not recognize them as citizens. Liew
develops the concept of the "ghost citizen" to understand a
global experience and a double oppression: of being invisible and
feared in law. The term also refers to two troubling state practices:
ghosting their own citizens and conferring ghost citizenship (casting
persons as foreigners without legal proof). Told through an
examination of law, legal processes and interviews with stateless
persons and their advocates, this deeply researched book examines
international and domestic jurisprudence as well as administrative
decision making to show an emerging practice where states are
pointing to a mother figure, constructed in law as racialized,
foreign and potentially disloyal, to depict persons as not kin and
therefore the responsibility of other states. By tracing British
colonial legal vestiges in the case study of Malaysia, Liew shows how
contemporary post-colonial, democratic and multi-juridical states
deploy law and its processes and historical ideas of racial
categories to create and maintain statelessness. This book challenges
established norms of state recognition and calls for a discussion of
ideas borrowed from other areas of law, including Indigenous legal
traditions and family law, on how we should organize our communities
with more respectful relations and treatment among kin.