“Ta’al Bachir (Come Tomorrow): The Politics of Waiting for Citizenship”
When it comes to extending citizenship to some groups, why might ruling political elites say neither “yes” nor “no,” but “wait”? The dominant theories of citizenship tend to recognize clear distinctions between citizens and aliens; either one has citizenship or one does not. Prof Lori will be discussing her book which shows that not all populations are fully included or expelled by a state; they can be suspended in limbo – residing in a territory for protracted periods without accruing citizenship rights. Her in-depth case study of the United Arab Emirates uses new archival sources and extensive interviews to show how temporary residency can be transformed into a permanent legal status. Temporary residency can informally become permanent through visa renewals and the postponement of naturalization cases. In the UAE, temporary residency was also codified into a formal citizenship status through the outsourcing of passports from the Union of the Comoros, allowing elites to effectively reclassify minorities into foreign residents.
Noora Lori is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Pardee School of Global Studies, Boston University. Her research focuses on citizenship, migration and racial politics in the Middle East and in comparative perspective. Her book, Offshore Citizens: Permanent “Temporary” Status in the Gulf (Cambridge University Press 2019) received the best book prize from the Migration and Citizenship section of the American Political Science Association (2020), the Distinguished Book Award from the Ethnicity, Nationalism, and Migration Studies section of the International Studies Association (2021), the Best Book in MENA (Middle East and North Africa) Politics from the APSA-MENA politics section of the American Political Science Association, and an honorable mention for the Best Book Award of the Association for Gulf and Arabian Peninsula Studies (AGAPS) (2021). She has published in the International Migration Review, International Journal of Middle East Studies, Journal of Global Security Studies, Ethnic and Racial Studies, International Relations, the Oxford Handbook on Citizenship, The Shifting Border, among other journals and edited volumes. Her work has been funded by the ACLS/Mellon foundation, Ziet-Stiftung Ebelin und Gerd Bucerius, the Hariri Institute for Computing and Computer Engineering (BU), the Initiative on Cities (BU) (2016; 2019), as well as other grants. She is the co-director (with Kaija Schilde) of the Pardee School Initiative on Forced Migration and Human Trafficking. At BU, she received the Gitner Family Prize for Faculty Excellence (2014) and the CAS Templeton Award for Excellence in Student Advising (2015). She was previously an Academy Scholar at the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies, a fellow at the International Security Program of the Harvard Kennedy School, and a visiting scholar at the Dubai School of Government. She received her PhD in Political Science from Johns Hopkins University’s (2013) and her dissertation received the Best Dissertation Award from the Migration and Citizenship Section of the American Political Science Association in 2014.
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