Chapter 4 gives an account of the role of repertoire and travel in German public theatre and how the Theater an der Ruhr works against national understandings of canonised theatrical repertoires. It examines why German repertoire theatres do not discard plays after a season but reperform them for years, even decades, and what consequences this has for actors and their self-cultivation, as well as for the building of an ethico-aesthetic tradition in an institution. This system goes hand in hand with the closely knit notion of the ensemble in German theatre. This chapter explores these notions through a case study of the transnational repertoire of the Theater an der Ruhr and their long-term collaborations with international theatre-makers from precarious parts of the world, known as the ‘international theaterlandscapes project’. I accompanied the Theater’s journey to Algeria and witnessed first-hand their cooperation with Algerian and Tunisian artists after the ‘Arab spring’, focusing on the way in which theatre develops forms of transnational diplomacy and troubles national narratives of cultural heritage.

While the National Socialists made a concerted effort to harness the emigrant nation wherever its members might be, they had no more success outside their areas of conquest than had previous regimes. In some ways, they had less. Moreover, their efforts to replace an inclusive notion of German cultural community with a racially exclusive one ultimately undermined Germans’ positions in other countries even more than the events of World War I. Those efforts within Europe also exposed the degree to which Germanness continued to be defined by its aggregate character even under their auspices.Their notion of the Volksgemeinschaft was defined more by its exclusions than its inclusions. The striking ways in which that fell short outside of Europe underscore the varieties of ways in which Germanness continued to be defined and performed abroad during the period of the war and the degree to which Germans’ fates outside of Europe were contingent on the states in which they lived. Geopolitics played important roles in recasting notions of belonging during this period of crisis, much as it had during earlier ones.Nevertheless, older notions of belonging persisted during and after the war.

This chapter deals with Germany’s position on individuals, human rights and international criminal responsibility. It is in seven parts: position of individuals; human rights; international refugee law; nationality and statelessness; international terrorism; international health law; and international criminal law. The second part covers the Federal Constitutional Court rejecting the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities’ interpretation of the CRPD; Germany’s criticism of Brunei’s Sharia Penal Code as violating human rights and of Saudi Arabia for violating the CRC; Germany’s concern over possible human rights abuses in Xinjiang, China; the German Federal Government adopting its thirteenth human rights report; and candidates nominated by Germany for human rights bodies. The fourth part discusses an amendment to the Nationality Act depriving members of terrorist militias with dual nationality of their German citizenship. The seventh part deals with the resignation of the German judge from the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals; Germany requesting Lebanon to extradite a Syrian official; German charges brought against Syrian officials for crimes against humanity and against a member of ‘Islamic State’ for war crimes; rulings on war crimes against property; and Germany’s view on possible crimes against humanity and war crimes and genocide in Myanmar.

This chapter examines life along the border from the era of the American Occupation through the rise of the Trujillo regime in 1930. It reconstructs the period from the testimonies of ethnic Haitian detainees. Analysis of court and police records from the period demonstrate a stark difference between enforcement in the decades of the 1920s and the 1930s. The year 1930 was a watershed. In 1930 Dominican-born ethnic Haitians were first systematically deported to Haiti and forced to pay for immigration permits. Executive Order 372, a racialized migration law introduced during the US occupation, played a crucial role in the process by which all ethnic Haitians became classified as foreigners. Through the evolving use of this law, ethnic Haitians who had previously been recognized as citizens, property owners and legal residents in Dominican territory were deported to Haiti. Others remained in Dominican territory, but in 1930, for the first time, people born on Dominican territory were reclassified as foreigners and they were forced to pay immigration tax. Far from a harmonious, bicultural border, the chapter illuminates the increasingly vulnerable legal status of ethnic Haitians through exploring systematic deportation, imprisonment, punitive taxation, lost citizenship, lost property, and displacement prior to the genocide.

One problem complicating the task of humanitarian protection is the quality of data on the populations most affected. If protection agencies cannot identify those who need help, then their ambitions are unlikely to be realized. This is especially relevant when considering “invisible,” hard-to-reach, or historically marginalized groups such as stateless people for whom we have little baseline data. Undercounting is often a political matter. Who is counted also tells us about governmental and institutional priorities and exposes biases about what counts, and the ways in which resources should be allocated. This chapter presents a critical review of how statelessness has been underestimated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its partners. It argues that the process of undercounting is indicative of a revisionist turn in humanitarian management characterized by a fixation with numbers and “results.” The ways in which the UNHCR data are presented reflects an increasingly top-down logic that ignores the lived experience of stateless people and does little to advance the cause of humanitarian protection.

Citizenship is not a neutral and stable status upon which to base rights, freedoms, and protections. It is also not a status available to all. As this chapter illustrates, citizenship is precarious and has never been a secure foundation upon which to base human rights. In the securitized world of the twenty-first century, this instability has heightened, especially for minorities. To make this argument, the chapter is divided into three sections. The first section explains how citizenship arose in international practice and law and how states translated international practice into defined nationality laws in the domestic sphere. This section highlights how before citizenship became a status to which human rights attached, it was, first and foremost, an international ordering principle. The second section demonstrates how states have historically excluded various groups, typically minorities, from enjoyment of full citizenship status, thereby endangering said groups’ access to human rights. The third section provides contemporary examples of citizenship deprivation and denial, highlighting the myriad justifications that states use to deny and deprive people of citizenship.

This chapter defines noncitizens as those who must live out their lives despite the states with most power over their lives, and despite the international system of states. Such individuals may also be citizens. That is, noncitizenship and citizenship are not opposites. They are instead two modes of relating to a state. This chapter argues that those experiencing the world as noncitizens have special and specific claims deriving from the significant additional burden placed upon them by the functioning of the states with most power over their lives, and by the international system. In practice, the rights of those in a noncitizen relationship with a state are often overlooked. People are often asked to demonstrate some special relationship with a particular state even in order to access the most basic of human rights. Usually this relationship must either be citizenship or some approximation to citizenship. This chapter argues that citizenship is not the only way in which an individual can have a relationship with a state, and that noncitizenship also gives rise to special and specific claims. Individuals should not be forced to contort themselves into something citizen-like in order to be considered eligible for rights.

Although the presence of the Kurdish diaspora is relatively new in the European contexts, it has nonetheless developed as a transnational community, enabled and facilitated by global communication technologies that can be used to politically mobilize resources in support of the Kurds in the Middle East. What makes the Kurdish diaspora a politicized diaspora is the persistent exclusionary and violence of the states against the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. It is during times of crisis and critical events that the Kurdish diaspora is materialized through its claims, lobbying and rallies across the West. Although migration can imply assimilation for many transnational communities, the Kurdish ambivalence vis-à-vis assimilation becomes tangible. It is also true that Kurds might be more receptive to assimilation due to their minoritized backgrounds in the country of origin and experiences of adaptation to the dominant culture and language. However, the political activism of diaspora and the strong attachment to Kurdish identity due to political oppression in the Middle East is a persistent reminder that Kurds have not come to the West to assimilate but to continue struggling for recognition of their identities and rights in the Middle East.

Chapter 9 deals specifically with the way in which the war affected the notions and practices of citizenship. It does so by switching the attention from enemy aliens to citizens of enemy origins. The chapter concentrates firstly on an analysis and discussion of the naturalization policies adopted by the various belligerent countries during the First World War. It then examines the spread of denaturalization statutes across Europe and the emergence of statelessness, concentrating both on state attitudes and public opinion and on the impact of naturalization and denaturalization policies on people of enemy origin. It also looks past the end of the war at the impact of those policies on interwar developments in inclusion and exclusion. The war played a crucial role in stabilizing differences between citizens and aliens and making them starker. It also imposed markers of identity (nationality, language, religion, ethnicity, “race”) on people, often regardless of their will or choice. In the name of military necessity and national security, authorities were willing to investigate origins and parentage or kinship, religion, language and all the markers that could indicate disloyalty to the nation in arms, thus implementing rigid notions of citizenship/subjecthood.

This chapter opens the third section of the book on the aftermath of the war. It addresses the end of the war and its many legacies. It starts with the armistice, and then considers the discussion about enemy aliens during the peace conference; it also explores the treaties that ended the war and their consequences for aliens, citizenship and property rights. It continues with the signing of all the final treaties, the emptying of the concentration camps and the lifting of the provisions on foreign movements, the agreement that regulated restitution or liquidation of assets, and the final exchange of populations. The chapter covers the period up to the late 1920s and deals with the transition from the state of emergency to peace, the resumption of naturalization procedures, new rules on borders and migration, new citizenship regimes that emerged from the war in both victorious and defeated countries as well as in the new successor states, and mass denaturalization and statelessness as a consequence of the emergence of new political regimes (such as the Soviet Union) or population exchange. It investigates the impact of special legislation on alien and enemy aliens on policies of migration control and explores the debate among jurists about the many violations of the conventions and human rights and the failed attempts at writing a new convention on enemy aliens.

The notion of language rights has proven to be highly controversial. It has typically been invoked in calls for the state to protect and recognize the heritage languages of minority communities. Implicit in such calls is a reliance on traditional understandings of what it means to be a member of a language community, to be a speaker of that community’s affiliated language, and to be a citizen of the state within which the community is embedded. But the conceptions of citizenship as well as those of community and language are changing – often in response to global shifts in mobility and migration. And these changes exacerbate rather than mitigate the problematic nature of language rights. In this chapter, I review various studies of citizenship, mobility, migration and language rights. Among the points that I make are the following: A fuller appreciation of implications of these changes needs to take into account the impact of neoliberalist ideologies. Recent developments such as the gig economy and virtual migration also need to be factored in. Underlying all these is the idea of personhood and how it variously informs the understanding of what it means to be a migrant, a citizen and a speaker of a language. I then flesh out the theoretical and policy implications of these studies, arguing that there is need to move beyond language rights if the migrant-citizen-language nexus is to be properly understood and fruitfully addressed.

This chapter argues for the idea of collective rights with which a people endow themselves in the face of political crises, as opposed to the more popular concept of human rights which is to be given by (often hostile) states to individuals, at the urging of international organizations. Citing examples such as those of the Zapatistas in Chiapas, Mexico and the people of Palestine, the author sheds light on the political rewards in the translation of the rights of the individual to collective rights. The latter kind has the advantage of having evolved from cultural specificities, as opposed to the more conventional idea of transcendent human rights. They are more in tune with material realities as well as unobligated to universal standards and forms.

This chapter gives an overview of the current debates regarding the way human rights has been defined and historicized. It argues that understanding these debates is crucial for an understanding of the ways in which human lights matter to literary study. Referencing the works of Johannes Morsink, Paul Gordon Lauren, Lynn Hunt, and Samuel Moyn, the author moves the through the varied points of origin and genealogies of human rights as we understand them today. The chapter shows that this present concept is by no means unambiguous, and argues that literature and its analysis provides us with one of the best ways to investigate the historical and political tensions that exist at its very foundations.