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"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"--
List of contents
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.
About the author
Yael Berda is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University and a non-resident fellow with the Middle East Initiative at the Harvard Kennedy school of Government. She is the author of Living Emergency: Israel's Permit Regime in the West Bank (2017) and The Bureaucracy of the Occupation (2012). Berda has worked as a practicing lawyer specializing in administrative, constitutional, and International law in Israel/Palestine.
