Conceptual analysis demonstrates how de-documentation destabilizes legal status across regional citizenship regimes, highlighting the bio-documentary power used to exclude vulnerable populations.
Drawing on recent critiques of liberal conceptions of legal-juridical citizenship, this article develops a model of disenchanted citizenship that moves away from treating legal-juridical citizenship as an unqualified good, normative value, or universal concept. Building on the concept of the regionally specific citizenship regime, constructions of citizenship that can be bound within one nation-state or extend across several, the article examines the inequalities, instabilities, and exclusions that remain central to contemporary regional constructions of citizenship. By offering new language to describe old and new processes of de-documentation, the review and revocation of core identity documents, and de-citizenship, the revocation of birthright or naturalized citizenship, the essay explores how citizenship remains a site of bio-documentary power, the power to make and unmake populations through the production, interrogation, destabilization, and even destruction of digital and physical files and documents.
No takes yet. Share an insight, caveat, or question.
Orlando Lara (2026) studied this question.
Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context: