The accidental citizen: acts of sovereignty and (un)making citizenship

How are citizens and foreigners made and unmade? This article addresses this question by taking Paul Virilio's recent theorizing on the accident as its point of departure. Virilio rethinks the received wisdom that says that the accident is solely that which is unexpected and contingent. According to Virilio, the invention or production of any technology is simultaneously also the production of its accident. To invent the train, he says, is to invent derailment; to invent aircraft is to invent the air crash. Technologies, therefore, can be assessed on the basis of the accidents they produce. In this article, I shift the focus of theories of the accident to the topic of citizenship. What is the primary accident of technologies of citizenship? What exclusions are enabled when the 'accident' is employed as a political category? These questions are addressed through an analysis of the discourse on 'accidental citizenship' in the United States. Accidental citizenship is a pejorative way of describing the 'birthright' citizenship of individuals who were born on US territory to non-citizen parents. I argue with reference to the case of the so-called 'second American Taliban' (Yaser Esam Hamdi) that the discourse of 'accidental citizenship' is being employed as a strategy for making and unmaking American citizenship. Accidental citizenship involves discursive technologies that enable an exceptional logic to be applied to legally normalized subjects, with the effect of excluding those who are included. Consequently, by focusing on the figure of the 'accidental citizen' in post-9/11 United States we can better understand the acts of sovereignty by which citizens and foreigners, friends and enemies are made and unmade. Keywords: citizenshipnon-citizenshipsovereigntyaccidentswar on terror Acknowledgments I am grateful for having had the opportunity to present earlier versions of this argument at a variety of settings, including the 'Acts of Citizenship' symposium at the Citizenship Studies Media Lab, York University, March 2004; the 'Critical Theory in Dark Times' conference at the University of Minnesota, April 2004; the Centre for International and Security Studies, York University, March 2005; and the Globalization and Postcolonialism Working Group, University of Western Ontario, April 2005. My thanks to the organizers and participants of these gatherings for their engagement and feedback. Special thanks go to Catherine Frost, Jef Huysmans, Engin Isin, Alina Sajed, Cynthia Wright and the anonymous reviewers. Notes 1. Accidental citizens are not unique to the jus soli tradition of making citizens. Different techniques of making children into citizens produce their own unique accidents. These accidents can both make and unmake citizens. For example, allocating citizenship through bloodline or descent (jus sanguinis) can also lead to accidental citizens. The case of Mr Young Jin Chun, a birthright American citizen and a life-long resident of Washington state, provides an illustrative example. Like many young Americans, Chun went abroad to teach English in order to earn money to attend university. Chun decided to go to South Korea, in part because he wanted to learn more about the country from which his parents had emigrated and where many of his extended family members still live. What Chun did not know was that he had been made a citizen of South Korea when his paternal grandfather entered his name into the national family census registry, the hojok. Since Korean law stipulates that all male citizens ages 18 to 35 must perform two years of military service, upon his arrival in South Korea Chun was drafted into the army as the result of 'a normal application of the law'. Dubbed the 'accidental citizen soldier' by the American press (Iwasaki Citation2004), Chun was unwittingly made into a South Korean citizen and his military service is an essential part of this identity. 2. I am indebted to Engin Isin and the researchers at the Citizenship Studies Media Lab (CSML) at York University for encouraging me to think about sovereignty as an 'act'. See the CSML website for a detailed discussion of 'acts of citizenship': http://csml.calumet.yorku.ca. 3. Lindh eventually pleaded guilty to the charges of fighting for the Taliban (enemy) and carrying arms against US forces (combatant). He received a twenty-year prison sentence. 4. Michael H. Mobbs is a Cold War security professional who has successfully refashioned himself into something of a government 'point-man' in the war on terror. He has a background in international corporate law and served as a nuclear arms negotiator for the Reagan administration. Since 9/11, Mobbs has played a key role in establishing the legal framework for the detention of enemy combatants in places like Camp X-Ray in Guantanomo Bay, Cuba. In addition to the 'declaration of facts' he wrote for Hamdi, he has produced an affidavit of evidence in the case of Jose Padilla (the so-called 'dirty bomber' who is being held without charge as another citizen-enemy combatant). In April 2003, Mobbs became the head of civil administration in Iraq, and put himself in charge of supervising eleven of the twenty-three ministries as well as purging the Baath party of Saddam loyalists (Cannon Citation2002; Whitaker Citation2003). 5. Accidents seem to plague Hamdi at every level of his claim to the rights of American citizenship, even down to being recognized by his own name. Yaser Hamdi's father has pointed out that his family's surname is actually spelled 'Himdy'. An improper translation from Arabic to English on his Saudi passport, and then onto Hamdi's American birth certificate, made his son known as Yaser Hamdi in the US (Brinkley Citation2004). 6 Amicus curiae brief submitted by Friends of Immigration Law Enforcements. See: www.fileus.com