Crisis and Opportunity: Gendered Citizenship, Structure and Agency in Exile

Expulsion from the state is approached as a crisis within both human rights and refugee studies, with Hannah Arendt proposing that the ‘loss of national rights was identical with the loss of human rights’ (Arendt 1976, 292). This analysis, conceptualises the state as a protective structure and seeks to rehabilitate the refugee into the state system, whether within a reformed natal state (through return), or into a new state (through local integration or resettlement), ultimately restoring the refugee as ‘citizen’. This model is rooted in what Nira Yuval Davis (1999, 119) terms ‘the “fraternal” enlightenment project’ and is both western centric and has a male, purportedly universal imagined citizen at its heart. Postcolonial feminist scholars have articulated the many ways in which third world/non-western women's relationships to the state are more commonly either distant or repressive. Expulsion from the state may not, for those who have held only notional or marginal citizenship, entail the ‘radical crisis’ of human rights (Agamben 1998, 126) that refugee studies and human rights theories conceive. Moments of rupture and crisis that disrupt powerful socio-cultural norms and break the alliance between constraining state and civil society structures can also be moments of social transformation and opportunity.

In this paper, we discuss a community of refugees in transit in Indonesia who are using their expulsion from the state to challenge constraining patriarchal norms within their community, profoundly changing gender, age and power relations. Tahira was a leader of this community for several years until her resettlement to Canada in 2017. We draw on the social practices and testimonies of this refugee community to examine the assumptions underpinning citizenship and question whether the social good that citizenship aims to deliver needs to be tied to the state.