Colonial Legacy and Administrative Memory: The Legal Construction of Citizenship in India, Israel and Cyprus

Abstract

This dissertation explains how British colonial legacies of population classification and surveillance molded the legal construction of citizenship in independent Israel, India and Cyprus. The administrative practices of the colonial state, particularly emergency laws and security measures, created an institutional iron cage that shaped the relationship between the state apparatus with national and ethnic minorities, by organizational means.

India, Cyprus, and Israel were part of the British Empire and shared a common legal framework, administrative structures, and toolkit of governance. In each of these territories, the trajectory of partition divided once colonized populations among different states; hence classification of populations into ethnic and religious categories was central to the processes of post-colonial state building. This study examines how each of these states used its administrative inheritance to deal with the movement of populations within new boundaries.

Methodologically, this dissertation investigates regime change, the transition from colonial rule to independence, from a perspective rarely studied: the daily and mundane bureaucratic practices and internal administrative negotiation reflected in administrative minutes, statistical tables and maps, for classifying populations. Drawing upon previously unexplored files from ministries of interior, the concentrated effort on legacies of organizational routines, which I call administrative memory, contributes new insights into the making of discriminatory practices of exclusion against minorities employed by democratic states, that is usually justified by a set of particular political, national or religious conflicts that are said to necessitate these practices.

Emergency laws in the colonies gave powers to officers to use extreme measures, but never specified against which populations these tools could be used. In order to turn the emergency laws into administrative practice, population had to be categorized on two axes: demographic traits such as religion, language, gender and class and administrative relationship to the state, namely, patriot, suspect, security threat or enemy-of-the state. Findings explain how practices of classification and data collection about civil populations, employed by modern states, turned into practices of surveillance and monitoring populations according to the level of loyalty to the state. In turn, these classifications based on suspicion, determined the access minorities had to identity documents, freedom of movement and eventually, political membership and rights.