Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship

Examines how the legacies of colonial bureaucracy continue to shape political life after empire.

Yael Berda (Author)

9781316511664, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 17 November 2022

280 pages
23.5 x 15.8 x 2.3 cm, 0.6 kg

'Contemplating the commonplace can be extraordinary. Yael Berda's comparative, multidisciplinary and nuanced study of everyday practices of British colonial bureaucrats in India, Israel/Palestine and Cyprus to understand modern citizenship in post-colonial partition states is such a contemplation. This erudite book is creative scholarship at its best.' Orna Ben-Naftali, Striks Law Faculty, Israel

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.

Introduction: the spectacle of independence and the specter of bureaucracy
Part I. Hybrid Bureaucracy: How Race and Emergency Shaped the Organization of Colonial Rule: 1. The effective disorder of hybrid bureaucracy
Part II. The Axis of Suspicion: Classifications of Identity and Mobility in Crises: 2. Forms of suspicion: mobility as threat, census as battleground
3. The Bureaucratic toolkit of emergency
Part III. Administrative Memory and the Legacies of Emergency: 4. Loyalty and Suspicion: making the Civil Service after Independence
5. How hybrid bureaucracy and permit regimes Made Citizenship
Conclusion: the file and the checkpoint - colonial bureaucracy and the making of contemporary citizenship.

Subject Areas: Comparative politics [JPB], Political science & theory [JPA], Ethnic studies [JFSL]