Irony of Citizenship: Descent, National Belonging, and Constitutions in the Postcolonial African State

Abstract

In 2010, like many African countries since the 1990s, Kenya passed a new constitution. This constitution aimed to get rid of many past issues including the definition of citizenship. Globally, two general principles govern the acquisition of citizenship, descent from a citizen (jus sanguinis), and the fact of birth within a state territory (jus soli). In contrast to the prior Constitution that required both descent from Kenyan parents and birth in Kenya, the 2010 Constitution adopted a rule of citizenship by descent alone (jus sanguinis) from either parent. However, today Kenya is faced with a conundrum first articulated by Aristotle: how do you understand and operationalize citizenship by descent in a new state, or in the case of Kenya, one that has only just turned fifty? The crux of this conundrum is determining the basis of the citizenship of parents who precede the polity and therefore what they can transfer to their children. Understanding that articulations of citizenship are also systems of exclusion, this paper asks who can and cannot be a Kenyan citizen and why? What are the unintended consequences of efforts to escape Aristotle's conundrum?

“The Ancestral Line is through the Father”: The Gendered Production of Statelessness in Rural Myanmar

“…The state, however, cannot exclude ethnic “others” simply by declaring ethnic membership to determine citizenship and creating official ethno-national categories. For ethnicity-based citizenship exclusion to work, the state must determine which markers of ethnic and national identity, such as language, dress, or family relations, are necessary to establish individuals’ ethno-national membership (Calavita 2000; Morning 2008; J. Kim 2019; Ng’weno and Aloo 2019). Such conversations also commonly revolve around questions of descent as states grapple with how to designate the ethno-national identity of children born to only one parent identified as belonging to a favorable ethno-national group (Laczo 2003; Collins 2011; Chung, Draudt, and Tian 2020).…”

Post-Colonial Citizenship and Decolonisation as a Turning Point: Continuities and Discontinuities in African States

“…Increasing population pressure on available agricultural land has reduced the welcome for migrants as workers or clients, especially, of course, at times of economic stress. Citizenship law has also been instrumentalised to bar from office individual politicians alleged to have origins in a neighbouring state (Whitaker, 2005;Manby, 2019), or generally to disenfranchise or constrain the economic power of historical migrant groups (Muzondidya, 2005;Aminzade, 2015;Ng'weno and Aloo, 2019); while the expulsion of alleged foreigners has been used almost as a tool of nation-building (Gray, 1998;Bezabeh, 2011). It is, however, hard to see an obvious pattern among those that chose to introduce explicit ethnic discrimination into the citizenship law, which include states amongst the most and least diverse on the continent (Manby, 2018, chap.…”

Citizen‐Suspect: Navigating Surveillance and Policing in Urban Kenya

“…2323Ng'weno and Aloo (2019) remind us that colonial policies contributed to the concentration of racial minorities in urban centers.…”