Past Event
Seminar

Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship

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Dr. Yael Berda, MEI Fellow and Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University, will discuss her new book, Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship, which examines how the legacies of colonial bureaucratic structures continue to shape political life after empire, with MEI Senior Fellow and journalist Rami Khouri.

Yael Berda

Event Description

Dr. Yael Berda, MEI Fellow and Associate Professor of Sociology and Anthropology at Hebrew University, will discuss her new book, Colonial Bureaucracy and Contemporary Citizenship, with MEI Senior Fellow and journalist Rami Khouri.

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.

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