{"id":20927,"date":"2018-12-02T13:11:54","date_gmt":"2018-12-02T13:11:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/?p=20927"},"modified":"2019-12-02T15:07:32","modified_gmt":"2019-12-02T15:07:32","slug":"citizenship-in-africa-the-law-of-belonging-blog","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/en\/citizenship-in-africa-the-law-of-belonging-blog\/","title":{"rendered":"Citizenship in Africa: The Law of Belonging (blog)"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Bronwen Manby takes us through her new book\u00a0<em>Citizenship in Africa: The Law of Belonging.\u00a0<\/em>In an important contribution to the literature on statehood, citizenship and identity in Africa, this piece highlights the importance of formal legal frameworks and contests over citizenship in determining who belongs.<\/p>\n<p>&#8212;<\/p>\n<p>Who belongs? And how do you decide? These are questions that are central to any community. In the context of the modern state, the rules are established by citizenship laws that set out the conditions for recognition as legally belonging to that state \u2013 with rights and responsibilities to match.<\/p>\n<p>The content of citizenship<a href=\"http:\/\/democracyinafrica.org\/citizenship-in-africa-the-law-of-belonging\/#_ftn1\" name=\"_ftnref1\">[1]<\/a>\u00a0laws can be politically controversial in any country. African states, whose borders were, for the most part, arbitrarily created at the stroke of a pen in Berlin in 1885, have particular challenges. The 1964 decision of the newly formed Organisation of African Unity to respect those borders committed the continent to the task of moulding the colonial units into legitimate political communities. A very large literature deals with the challenges to this task posed by questions of identity and belonging, and the\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.palgrave.com\/gb\/book\/9780312099541\">\u201ccrisis of nationality and sovereignty\u201d<\/a>\u00a0that result.<\/p>\n<p>Read further:\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/democracyinafrica.org\/citizenship-in-africa-the-law-of-belonging\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\">http:\/\/democracyinafrica.org\/citizenship-in-africa-the-law-of-belonging\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bronwen Manby takes us through her new book\u00a0Citizenship in Africa: The Law of Belonging.\u00a0In an important contribution to the literature on statehood, citizenship and identity in Africa, this piece highlights the importance of formal legal frameworks and contests over citizenship in determining who belongs. &#8212; Who belongs? And how do you decide? These are questions [&hellip;]","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20927","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","region-pan-africa","type-blog-posts","item-year-642","item-theme-acquisition-of-nationality","item-theme-african-and-international-standards","item-theme-deportation-and-mass-expulsions","item-theme-discrimination","item-theme-dual-nationality","item-theme-identity-documents","item-theme-internal-citizenship","item-theme-loss-and-deprivation-of-nationality","item-theme-nationality-and-elections","item-theme-nationality-and-refugees","item-theme-state-succession","item-theme-statelessness"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20927","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20927"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20927\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":25385,"href":"https:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20927\/revisions\/25385"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20927"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20927"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citizenshiprightsafrica.org\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20927"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}