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Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf. By Lori Noora. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 302 p. $99.99 cloth.
State-generated documents provide evidentiary proofs of citizenship, but their role is not always so clear. The very documents that are used to acquire and cement citizenship can also be distributed by states to strategically deny citizenship claims. It is the latter that is the subject of this timely and much-needed contribution.
Noora Lori’s Offshore Citizens investigates the unique case of the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) purchase of foreign passports from the poor African island nation of the Union of Comoros in 2008 to distribute as an identity document to its subnational minorities without their consent. Because these passports do not afford rights or protections by either the Union of Comoros or the UAE, this arrangement was seen as a “novel and puzzling” (p. 5) state strategy of denaturalization. The passports allowed federal authorities in Abu Dhabi to effectively convert “domestic minorities” into “foreign residents” without the individuals ever leaving the country. The new passports came with the “specter of deportation” (p. 212), because the recipient was now legally subject to the discretionary power of the state through contingent and revocable residency rights. Moreover, because these 80,000–120,000 long-term minorities did not possess an important citizenship document, the khulāṣat al-qayd or family book, the UAE reclassified them as bidūn (stateless). They were disqualified from Emirati citizenship because their lineage was outside the officially recognized Arab tribes listed in the 1925 British census. This created a “de facto” statelessness (p. 40)—an exclusion that was “short of expulsion” (p. 5).
Based on an extensive archival study of more than 3,200 documents and data from 180 semi-structured in-depth interviews, Lori lays out a richly detailed history and analysis of how this exclusion came to be. She suggests two possible explanations....