Doctoral Dissertation Research - Colonial Legacies and Administrative Memory: The Legal Construction of Population Management Practices in Three Former British Colonies

Princeton University, Princeton NJ

Investigators

Abstract

Regime change carries a promise that it will bring about transformation, reform and progress. However, even after political leadership undergoes radical changes, state bureaucracies and administrations often prevent implementation of new policies. Nowhere is this more visible than in the transition of modern states from colony into post-colony, where one would expect independent governments to differentiate themselves from their colonial predecessors. But former British colonies reveal surprising degrees of formal similarity with the new democratic regimes, in definitions of citizenship, residency and immigration. This project goes beneath that formal surface to examine the administrative practices of three former British colonies in the area of population management before and after independence. This project inquires into whether and how colonial legacies persist, and, where they do, traces how these legacies shape the governing practices of nascent democracies. To examine colonial practices and their legacies, the investigators explore the micro-routines of administrative practices in three former British colonies: Israel, Cyprus and India. All three states suffered from inter-communal violence and subsequent partition following their independence from the British Empire. Through historical comparison of their administrative archives, the investigators construct organizational portraits of the departments of immigration both in the colonial state and in the independent states that followed. In recent years, the field of population management, in which governments classify populations according to their status as citizens, residents, aliens, intruders or suspicious persons, has become crucial to issues of security and national identity, both in law and society scholarship and in policy debates. This project explores how those classifications are created and passed on through daily administrative practices, even through regime changes. Understanding how mechanisms of continuity perpetuate inequalities and prevent change will enable policy makers to better anticipate where active organizational transformation is needed in order to promote democratic practices and curb legacies of discrimination.