On becoming citizens of the ‘non-existent’: document production and Syrian-Circassian wartime migration to Abkhazia

ABSTRACT

This paper explores the centrality of passports and identification documents (or their lack thereof) in peoples’ everyday lives and life chances, particularly in the contexts of forced displacement and protracted conflict. While the production of largely internationally unrecognized passports reasserts the logics of the globally dominant modern nation-state order, it also lays bare the problematic, fragile, and performative qualities of that system. I argue that the bureaucratic processes of document production for wartime migrants reveal the racializing effects of codified legal and ethnic classifications. As such, the production of passports and legal identification documents plays a formative role in the ethno-racial exclusions embedded in statecraft projects. This paper invites readers to consider how passports and identification documents affect multiple aspects of life, including access to work opportunities, mobility, and housing—and how people creatively traverse the confinments of these documents and their bureaucratic categories.

KEYWORDS:

• Migration
• displacement
• passport-production
• statehood
• Abkhazia
• Syria
• Circassian
• Caucasus
• return
• racialization

Acknowledgement

I would like to first and foremost thank all my interlocutors, friends, acquaintances, and family in Abkhazia for being so generous with their time and knowledge. Second, I am deeply grateful to Marika Sosnowski, Bart Klem, and the rest of the contributors of the Legal Identity issue for their mentorship and rigorous feedback on this paper. The seeds for this project began when I was a graduate student at the American University in Cairo, and it would not have been possible without the mentorship of Munira Khayyat, Hakem Rustom, and Hanan Sabea. Finally, I am deeply grateful to my faculty mentors at UCSB: Elana Resnick, Sherene Seikaly, Barbara Harthorn, and Vladimir Hamed-Troyansky. I would like to also acknowledge the Wenner Gren Foundation, the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Santa Barbara, and the Association for Slavic, Eastern European, and Eurasian Studies (ASEEES) for supporting this research.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. These are different linguistic pronunciations of the same word, Circassian.

2. I decided to refer to these officials also using pseudonyms.

3. To protect peoples’, I use pseudonyms throughout the article.

4. Kamila explained to me when we first met that she’s an ‘Arab-Syrian’, and not Sharkaseyh (Circassian), but she fell in love with a Circassian man and this was her point of connection to the community, and eventually to Abkhazia.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies; Wenner-Gren Foundation.