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.
Legal categories and classification of personal identity by the state have a crucial impact on people’s lives. Particularly with regards to citizenship, legal categories draw boundaries between insiders and outsiders, those who belong in nation and those excluded. The law defines the classifications, but it is the administration that turns the letter of the law into reality on the ground: practices, routines, documents and physical spaces like borders, detention centers and refugee camps. Legal categories of citizen, resident, migrant, refugee and intruder are the building blocks of a major function of modern states: population management. In this project I investigated the power of organizational practices in the field of population management and show how administrations shape policies through their practices of discrimination on the basis of race, religion and gender. I examined how those practices persisted, even when major political change occurred. I used historical archives from India, Israel and Cyprus that had been British Colonies that inherited similar legal frameworks. All three countries experienced severe inter-communal conflicts and were designated for partition by the British Colonial government. Colonial Emergency laws governed all three states, as they struggled for independence. After independence, the experienced dramatic violence that created boundaries and categories of identity, displacing hundreds of thousands of people, turning them overnight from colonial subjects to refugees. To get at how this worked, I examined official documents generated by mid-level administrators in the last years of the colonial state and the first years of independence. In the archives, I concentrated on documents about classification of people’s identity, in departments in charge of immigration, passports, monitoring borders and allocating civil servants. My hypothesis was that administrative practices were more powerful than laws and that, even when the laws changed, the practices continued. I expected to find that the more practices of the colonial administration remained after the states became independent democracies, the more the state would violate people’s rights. My findings show a fascinating relationship between laws and administration. I found that it was not only the amount of colonial practices that determined the extent of violations to civil rights, but also whether the new state had kept or annulled the colonial emergency laws that had initiated practices of surveillance and monitoring movement in the first place. In India and Israel, the emergency laws persisted, and in both states, despite many other differences between them, practices the colonial government used against those whom it classified as suspect continued to be used after independence. These practices were used in independent Israel and India against the minority Muslim population to exclude them for claiming citizenship and accessing rights in the new state after independence. exclusion was enabled by establishing permit regimes in the years before formal citizenship laws were enacted. Basically, colonial practices of surveillance and control were used to construct citizenship in the new states and leave the "undesirables" out. In Cyprus, colonial emergency laws were repealed at independence. Three years later, the new republic’s constitution collapsed and the Turkish Cypriot minority left their positions in the government. A decade later, the island was partitioned. Even though Cyprus had similar administrative practices to India and Israel during colonial rule, Cyprus differed from other cases in abolishing the colonial emergency laws after independence. While colonial administrative practices of population management -- classification of populations, surveillances and movement restrictions, blacklists and permit systems for entry and exit of the state – were similar in all three cases, the difference between India and Israel one the one hand, and Cyprus on the other, was that emergency laws provided the backbone of legitimacy for the use of these practices against minorities in the colonial period and after for India and Israel, but only the colonial period in Cyprus. I did not find evidence for an institutional legacy of colonial population management practices or any relationship between restrictions on movement on Turkish Cypriots and their political membership. Turkish Cypriots have been citizens of the Republic of Cyprus since its independence. At independence, Cyprus had annulled the Emergency Defense Regulations. It has never declared a state of emergency during the riots of 1963 or the Turkish invasion of 1974. Therefore, the legal tools that the Defense regulations provide were absent from the administrative repertoire in Cyprus. As this research shows, administrative practices that curb civil rights are inherited by new democratic states, and methods that were used against colonial subjects are adapted and used against minorities who become citizens after independence. Despite dramatic changes in government, the legitimacy provided unchecked executive power and wide authority to violate rights on grounds of security, carries over from one regime into another. As this research shows, old political habits die-hard even when there is a complete transition from colonial to democratic government, especially governments that do not repeal emergency laws.
