Legal identity under insurgencies and unrecognised states

Legal identity comprises a documented relationship between a person, the law and the state. Some insurgencies seek to replace the state and start issuing legal identity documents (e.g.

ID cards or birth certificates) to the people under their control.We study this phenomenon and its wide-ranging implications by looking at three complementary cases:the Kachin Independence Organisation/Army in Myanmar (which recently started issuing ID documents);the Syrian Interim Government (which used to issue ID documents but now faces defeat);the Turkish Republic of North Cyprus (which has become an established but widely unrecognized state).We will explore what shape legal identity takes in these three contexts, what implications it has for the people affected, and how these people navigate major political shifts.Legal identity is an SDG target (16:9) and it underpins the SDGs at large.

Not having a recognized legal identity can severely implicate people’s human rights and it may cause statelessness.

Our project is academically relevant, because it goes to the core of unresolved tensions around theorising sovereign statehood and the authority to make law.Conceptually we develop an inter-disciplinary combination of rebel governance literature in social/political science and critical interventions in legal scholarship.

Methodologically, our ethnographic fieldwork will draw on an innovative combination of political histories, personal life histories and material culture.