This chapter explores the legacies of indenture for international law in Asia through a survey of the existing scholarship and points to new directions for research. Focusing on indentured labor from India, which comprised the majority of labourers recruited under this system in the nineteenth and early twentieth century, it shows how indenture shifted definitions of emigrants and foreigners, shaped discourses on welfare in migration, and left its mark on international relations as they emerged in the aftermath of the two world wars. The chapter also discusses how questions of nationality and citizenship in the postcolonial period often overlooked the plight of the descendents of indenture in Asia, and concludes with speculations on what the new form of indenture is and the limits of drawing these historical analogies.

First dramatically, then with ever-growing complexity, World War I began a long-running, openly contentious reordering of gender relations, gender understandings, and public gender regimes. Mobilization for total war articulated men’s citizenship to soldiering; women’s to motherhood. Harnessed to family in multifarious ways, each profoundly altered and strengthened belonging in the nation. Those processes of regendering shaped interwar public policy across multiple spheres: welfare provision and social services; broader social policy and public health; regulation of sexuality and reproductive rights; education and public morality. While presenting across Europe as common exigencies and desiderata, in democratic polities no less than in fascist regimes or the Soviet Union, this welfarist political complex varied markedly with different types of polity. The “front experience” became processed by many younger veterans and aspiring soldiers into a militarized outlook of aggressively misogynist, heedlessly violent, and empathy-purged masculinity.

Chapter 4 focuses on the educational programs that the Children’s Bureau and state bureaus ran with Sheppard-Towner funding. Sheppard-Towner programs aimed to standardize American “mothercraft” and to teach citizenship through educational initiatives: little mothers’ leagues, mothers’ courses, educational films, and instructional material mailed to mothers. Much of this educational information came directly from the Children’s Bureau and reflected federal and state agents’ beliefs that there was one “correct” method of childrearing that could and should be taught to all American mothers. Their educational efforts often sought to circumvent actual mothers and focused instead on shaping the next generation of “potential mothers” – young girls. Through these educational programs, both state and national bureaus gained greater access to the intimate lives of their constituents and tried to shape familial relations nationwide. Critically, they also taught mothers and children how to see and engage with state and federal agencies – as well as how to exchange personal data for state services.

The only form of knowledge about ethnicity that officially and permanently attaches to individuals in Kenya is the register of citizens kept by the National Registration Bureau, which issues ID cards. In this chapter, I briefly trace the history of the ID card in colonial labour control practices (not civil registration), but focus on the deeply ambiguous role of ethnicity in registration over recent years. I show how there is a disconnect between the lack of a place for ethnicity in law or regulation surrounding IDs, yet its continued presence in practice. I then examine several cases of minority ethnic community leaders engaged in what I call ‘code seeking’, where they successfully lobbied for recognition as ‘tribes of Kenya’ as a path to securing ID cards – de facto proof of citizenship for people otherwise stateless. However, I also show that other people, in this example, the Galje’el people, a sub-clan of Somalis, have not been and likely will not be successful with this strategy. This chapter draws our attention to the benefits of both classification and vagueness, while remaining vigilant about their risks.

This chapter begins the analysis of how American society prepared a space for someone like Trump to dominate public life. The major symptom was that citizens failed to not elect Trump and therefore twice elevated to be president a man who had no qualifications to administer the Executive Branch of a democratic government consisting of more than 4,000,000 employees and multiple responsibilities. He was, however, a “populist,” who promised to act on behalf of “the people” as if the people were entitled to throw off rule by “elites.” And together, he and his associates admired what scholars call “neoliberalism,” whereby many traditional, and democratic, political practices are overridden in favor of unleashing “private innovators” – such as Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg – to acquire enormous wealth and influence. Assuming that Trump is a populist, we should observe that America’s crisis is not so much a failure of democratic “institutions” – agencies, procedures, etc. – as it is that “citizens” have failed to vote to support those institutions. Thus Defending Democracy is about how citizens must do their job – their “vocation” – more and better.

By asking how political communities are constructed and with what boundaries, this book has explored different conceptualizations of nation, different perceptions of territory and dynamics of unity and division. It has presented alternative notions of political community outside of the nation-state paradigm, in communities smaller than the state and going beyond the boundaries of the state. My work has devoted attention to the beginnings of political communities or to their reshaping processes. By establishing boundaries between ‘us’ and ‘them’, these communities defined themselves at different levels: the local, regional, transnational and national levels. In the border region between Ghana and Togo, these political communities were built on top of each other, like a palimpsest, and intersected with the Ghanaian and Togolese states that used these dynamics to their advantage. This book endeavours to make us rethink the notion of the nation-state and its associated concepts in light of these dynamics: citizenship, elections, border and nation-state.

In this chapter, the book is introduced by interrogating how a political community is constructed and with what membership boundaries, especially when it lies across borders, or at another level than the nation-state. I argue that the political belonging found at the local level and based on ideas of ‘indigeneity’ – whereby the individual is bound to a particular community and has access to a bundle of rights by virtue of the ‘first-comer’ or ‘early-comer rule’– informs and contributes to the making of other types of political belonging at different levels.

The convergence of citizenship towards indigeneity implies that the instability of one can easily lead to the instability of the other. This chapter analyses how the two main political parties in Ghana capitalized on the blurred boundary between citizenship and indigeneity and how images of exclusion conveyed by the Aliens Compliance Order (that instructed all foreigners without residence permits to leave Ghana within 14 days) in 1969 strengthened the image of the NPP (New Patriotic Party) as seeking to exclude Ewe-speakers from the nation in the 1990s (in political campaigns) and the 2000s (including in the national debate about cross-border voting).

Chapter 5 examines how white supremacy manifested itself in different forms across English-speaking societies from roughly 1800 to 1865. It reveals a fundamental tension between claims of white people as uniquely freedom-loving and their role as colonizers and enslavers. The chapter explores how even self-styled “enlightened” whites often justified slavery and oppression through paternalistic arguments about racial “degradation” rather than explicit racial hatred. It details various strategies for removing nonwhites from white spaces, including deportation schemes, forced relocation, and cultural elimination through boarding schools. It highlights how violence against indigenous peoples in the USA, Australia, and Canada often culminated in genocide, while colonial authorities blamed such violence on “degraded whites” to justify further oppression. Throughout this period, white supremacy demonstrated remarkable adaptability, shifting between seemingly benevolent paternalism and outright elimination of nonwhite populations. Though the US Civil War ultimately established Black citizenship rights, white supremacy persisted by finding new ways to maintain racial hierarchies.

Chapter 5 looks at political communities in the making and historicises the notion of citizenship status during and after colonialism. In Ghana, citizenship criteria have evolved from a combination of jus soli and jus sanguinis principles to a purely jus sanguinis principle, as if to compensate for the porous nature of Ghana’s borders. This evolution shows a tendency to render citizenship more exclusionary, and more dependent on filiation and indigeneity, creating other boundaries within the nation. Yet the unsystematic and deficient systems of documentation prior and after independence cannot provide proof of one’s status with certainty. This is why new nations (such as Ghana) and local communities end up using the principle of indigeneity to prove their legitimacy to belong. This chapter suggests that indigeneity and citizenship constitute each other and that those who belong are those who can convince of the indigeneity of their ancestors. These narratives of indigeneity being prone to contestation, citizenship is at the same time at risk of being undermined. This implies that local belonging and citizenship can easily be conflated.