Description
In 2024, the UN will convene a Summit of the Future focused on global goals including inclusion (‘Leave no one behind’) and international law and justice including ‘legal identity for all’. Scholarship on statelessness and ‘noncitizenship’ (Tonkiss and Bloom, 2015) has already posed questions about this as a future aim and shown how both laws and ‘hierarchies of personhood’ (Kingston 2019) reproduce discrimination and exclusion. In considering this conference’s interest in what international studies can ‘contribute to a summit of the future’, this paper considers people with noncitizen legal identities and what they can tell us about the futures of justice and inclusion. The conference call also encourages IR scholars to think ‘about how the local and global interact’. This is welcome because IR has rarely ‘take[n] seriously enough the hyper-local – such as the home’ (Mac Ginty 2019, p. 235). This paper shows that taking home and the hyper-local seriously leads to alternative ways of theorising and practicing noncitizenship. It looks at hyper-local spaces of exclusion and inclusion, mindful to avoid romanticising the vernacular (Mac Ginty 2019, p. 238). Even so, it considers peace education in schools and conversational English classes as potentially subversive spaces of inclusion and suggests that the UN’s stated interest in ‘a renewed social contract anchored in human rights’ might be more helpful than international law for the future inclusion of people with noncitizen legal identities.
