Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship: Legacies of Race and Emergency in the Former British Empire

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Introduction: The spectacle of independence & the specter of bureaucracy -- The effective disorder of hybrid bureaucracy -- Forms of suspicion : mobility as threat, census as battleground -- The bureaucratic toolkit of emergency -- Loyalty and suspicion--making the civil service after independence -- How hybrid bureaucracy & permit regimes made citizenship -- Conclusion: The file & the checkpoint--colonial bureaucracy & the making of contemporary citizenship.

"Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship examines how the legacies of colonial bureaucracy continue to shape political life after empire. Focusing on the former British colonies of India, Cyprus, and Israel/Palestine, the book explores how post-colonial states use their inherited administrative legacies to classify and distinguish between loyal and suspicious subjects and manage the movement of populations, thus shaping the practical meaning of citizenship and belonging within their new boundaries. The book offers a novel institutional theory of "hybrid bureaucracy" to explain how racialized bureaucratic practices were used by powerful administrators in state organizations to shape the making of political identity and belonging in the new states. Combining sociology and anthropology of the state with the study of institutions, this book offers new knowledge to overturn conventional understandings of bureaucracy, demonstrating that routine bureaucratic practices and persistent colonial logics continue to shape unequal political status to this day"-- Provided by publisher.