About
Non-Registration of Birth: A Global Problem
Around the world migrants’ descendants face a heightened risk of statelessness—and not only in contexts of forced migration. As states securitize both identity and migration management systems, how might the introduction of ‘bordering practices’ prevent racialized people on the move from proving their identity and claiming citizenship—in any country—for their progeny?
This website seeks to mobilize findings from Birth Registration as Bordering Practice, a research and book project that examines global patterns of inequality in access to citizenship because of blocked access to birth certificates. Through a content analysis of UN treaty body recommendations, government, and civil society reports, the project tracks how states produce statelessness amongst the children of migrants by restricting access to birth certificates and proof of citizenship.
International development practitioners, along with public health and demographic scholarship, have often framed the problem as the non-registration of birth. This project argues that birth registration itself is the primary concern — put simply, birth registration is a bordering practice and an exercise of state power for those a given state is unwilling to recognize and protect.
Additionally, in order to enable researchers to analytically distinguish the types of practices which produce intergenerational statelessness in diverse contexts of human mobility, the project also proposes different types of bordering practices: corporeal, temporal, social, spatial-mobile, and spacial-territorial. This website directly engages with practitioners and researchers alike to provide an overarching framework of recognition for harmful birth registration practices, in order to better identify and resist them in the context of human rights and advocacy work. This public knowledge production contributes to a re-evaluation of development practitioners’ thinking about identity documentation and social inclusion in order to better support children’s rights to citizenship worldwide.
