Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship examines how the legacies of colonial bureaucracy continue to shape political life after empire. Focusing on the former British colonies of India, Cyprus, and Israel/Palestine, the book explores how post-colonial states use their inherited administrative legacies to classify and distinguish between loyal and suspicious subjects and manage the movement of populations, thus shaping the practical meaning of citizenship and belonging within their new boundaries. The book offers a novel institutional theory of 'hybrid bureaucracy' to explain how racialized bureaucratic practices were used by powerful administrators in state organizations to shape the making of political identity and belonging in the new states. Combining sociology and anthropology of the state with the study of institutions, this book offers new knowledge to overturn conventional understandings of bureaucracy, demonstrating that routine bureaucratic practices and persistent colonial logics continue to shape unequal political status to this day.

‘Examining the legacies of ‘emergencies’ during British rule in India, Cyprus and Palestine-Israel, this eye-opening book shows us how the seemingly mundane logics of bureaucracy served as the fulcrum for racialized power, citizenship, and the unequal management of subjugated peoples. A compelling history of our persistent colonial present.’

Julian Go - The University of Chicago

‘A sophisticated, inter-disciplinary, and comparative study of the colonial legacies of bureaucratic micro-practices in India, Israel/Palestine and Cyprus. In this strikingly original work, Berda interprets citizenship as a mobility regime, emptied of rights by bureaucratic determinations of loyalty and suspicion based on racial hierarchy, and the pervasiveness of emergency laws.’

Niraja Gopal Jayal - King’s College London

‘By considering the way in which bureaucratic procedures have come to define postcolonial citizenship before, in place of, and apart from the law, Yael Berda offers us a wholly new framework for understanding colonial legacies at a global level. Detailed and expansive at the same time, her book is a model of comparative analysis.’

Faisal Devji - University of Oxford

‘Combining compelling forensic legal analysis with deeply researched comparative study of partition and state-formation in India, Israel and Cyprus, Berda skillfully uncovers the ‘bureaucratic toolkit’ of routinized emergency that emerged in the transition from colonial rule to independence, transforming our understanding of citizenship in the 20th century.’

Rohit De - Yale University

‘Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship is a major comparative and historical study of colonial and postcolonial politics. Berda identifies a ‘hybrid’ form of informal colonial administration based on emergency rule and the classification of subjects according to ‘race’ and loyalty to the regime. In independent Cyprus, India, and Israel, these practices were perpetuated in practices of partition, emergency governance, gradated citizenship, and regulated spatial mobility.’

George Steinmetz - University of Michigan

‘Contemplating the commonplace can be extraordinary. Yael Berda's comparative, multidisciplinary and nuanced study of everyday practices of British colonial bureaucrats in India, Israel/Palestine and Cyprus to understand modern citizenship in post-colonial partition states is such a contemplation. This erudite book is creative scholarship at its best.’

Orna Ben-Naftali - Striks Law Faculty, Israel

‘… this impressive, interdisciplinary book deserves a wide readership. It has significant comparative and historical value and will be of interest to scholars from many fields, studying topics ranging from migration and citizenship to colonial and post-colonial bureaucracy to the politics of partition.’

Keren Weitzburg Source: Journal of Law and Society