Abstract
To date, the established bases of civic belonging have assigned membership by reference to a proxy. Jus soli determines belonging by the place of birth, and jus sanguinis by parentage. Jus pecuniae determines it by the capacity to pay, and the network state by a declaration the person makes about themselves. In each case, a proxy is substituted for the person and treated as constitutive of their civic identity. This paper terms that operation ‘capture’ and distinguishes it from ‘recognition,’ whereby civic identity is determined from what a person manifests. It argues that arbitrary civic classification amounts to domination in the sense given by Pettit (1997), which is uncontrolled power over what a person may be permitted to be. Consequently, a procedural right against that domination follows from the republican account of freedom; it requires that classificatory power over oneself be contestable, answerable, revisable and exit-permitting. The correlative duty is a duty to render classification controlled, which does not extend to a duty to admit. As these bases compound across states, a person may hold full status in two polities without either of them recording anything of the life that person actually leads – a condition this paper terms ‘not stateful’ and considers alongside statelessness. This also clarifies the role of the state, which is limited to classification, as recognition in the full sense is conferred by the people among whom a person lives, and the right exists to ensure that the former does not foreclose the latter. The lead application is post-geographic sovereignty and civic migration without physical movement. The interstellar case from which the paper originates is its limiting instance, and displaced populations are the domain in which the right is most urgent. Lastly, a cooperative measurement polity is advanced as one institution capable of discharging the duty. It is held to a stricter standard than the state it supplements, since every control the state cannot feasibly offer is one the cooperative is able to provide.
Keywords: non-domination, citizenship, civic classification, recognition, sovereignty, post-geographic governance, cooperative, civic migration, jus soli, jus sanguinis
1. Introduction
The modern nation-state system assigns civic belonging through mechanisms premised upon historical accident. Jus soli confers citizenship according to the geographic location of birth, and jus sanguinis according to parental nationality. Jus pecuniae (the market in purchased citizenship that has operated for four decades) confers it on the basis of the capacity to pay. Even the network state, which appears to escape the accidents of birth, grounds membership in a declaration the person makes about themselves. However, a self-issued declaration is no less a proxy than a state-issued one, as what a person endorses does not exhaust what they manifest. Each basis thus substitutes a proxy for the person and treats it as constitutive of their civic identity, and in no case is the person concerned asked whether that substitution is correct. The question from which this paper originates demonstrates the contingency of the arrangement most plainly. A child born in a settlement on Mars is born on ground that treaty law prohibits any state from claiming; jus soli therefore has no application, while the descent rules of the parents’ states confer a nationality that may not pass to the child’s own children (Haqq-Misra 2023).
A polity must determine who a person is in civic terms before it can determine where that person belongs, and that determination can be reached in one of two ways. The first is recognition, whereby civic identity is determined from what a person manifests in a life actually lived. The second is capture, in which a proxy is fixed in the person’s place and treated as constitutive. Every basis of belonging the modern state offers is an instance of capture. This paper will argue that capture is a wrong and that a right exists against it. The strongest objection to that claim is one this paper accepts: demonstrating that civic identity can be measured establishes only that measurement is feasible, whereas jus asserts a right. A Latin term cannot of itself establish a right that has not been derived, and Section 3 therefore derives it on republican grounds. To fix a person’s civic status on a basis they do not control, cannot contest on its merits and did not choose is to hold uncontrolled power over what they may be permitted to be. According to Pettit (1997), uncontrolled power amounts to domination whether or not it is ever exercised. The right that follows is procedural. It requires that classificatory power over oneself be contestable, answerable, revisable and exit-permitting, and it binds any authority that classifies – although it is not a right to be admitted anywhere, which is a limit Section 3 shows the derivation itself to impose.
The lead application pertains to the territorial sovereignty that presently organises belonging. For most of modern history, geographic proximity correlated with shared language, culture and economic interest, and the border was a reasonable approximation of the population within it. However, that approximation is now eroding. The resulting mismatch is evident in polarisation within borders and in alignment forming across them, and it makes observable an arbitrariness that was present in the arrangement from the outset. In place of territorial assignment, this paper proposes civic migration without physical movement, a reconfiguration of a person’s civic belonging as the person changes, and one that requires nobody to cross a border. Civic migration is the operation of the revisability condition, which is the mechanism by which a controlled classification continues to correspond to a person who changes over time. The interstellar case remains the premise of the paper and its limiting instance, since it is the point at which the territorial proxy has no referent at all. Although the derivation in Section 3 does not depend upon it, Section 2.1 demonstrates that the same question already arises on Earth. Displaced and stateless populations are the domain in which the right is most urgent, as they are already subject to classification without their consent, and have the least means of contesting it. Arendt (1951) observed that rights presuppose membership. That observation strengthens the claim without being its foundation, and Section 3 returns to it.
Moreover, there is a population between the member and the stateless person which the literature on membership seldom names. These are persons who hold full status, frequently in more than one state, under classifications that record proxies, and say nothing of the lives they classify. This paper terms the condition ‘not stateful.’ It is produced less by any single rule than by rules acting in combination – as where two descent regimes, each defensible on its own terms, leave a person temporary both in the country in which they were formed and in the country that claims them. The condition also clarifies the respective roles of the state and of the society it classifies. A state may classify a person correctly in every record, while nobody around that person knows who they are, because recognition in the full sense is conferred by the people among whom a person lives and works, and no decree is able to confer it. What a state is able to do is classify in a manner that does not foreclose that recognition, and it is to this that the right derived here is directed. Renan (1882) identified the problem in part when he located the nation in shared memory and a present will to live together, having rejected race, language and soil as its basis. Sections 3.1 and 3.4 consider the effect of birthright rules upon each element of that account.
This argument will be developed in ten sections. Firstly, Section 2 examines the structural failure of geographic sovereignty and contends that it is a failure of freedom as well as a failure of fit. Section 3 then derives the right, and identifies who holds it and who bears the corresponding duty. Sections 4 and 5 set out the framework that would satisfy the right, and identify civic identity as a domain of measurement. Sections 6 and 7 advance the cooperative as a candidate identity polity, and develop civic migration and the refugee application. Section 8 applies the derived right to the framework as the standard by which the framework is judged, and addresses the objection that descent is itself part of who a person is. Lastly, Section 9 sets out the validation the framework requires, and Section 10 concludes.
2. The Structural Failure of Geographic Sovereignty
Geographic sovereignty governs people by proxy. The coordinates of a person’s birth and the nationality of their parents are treated as though they constituted the person’s civic identity, when at most they approximated it. For most of modern history, the proxy corresponded to the person closely enough that the substitution went unremarked; territorial proximity correlated with shared language, economy and civic outlook, and the border approximated the aligned population within it. This section documents the erosion of that approximation. The argument here is diagnostic, as the failure it describes is a failure of the proxy to correspond to the person, which makes observable an arbitrariness the arrangement contained from the outset. An inaccurate proxy does not of itself establish anything about entitlement or duty. Whether the arbitrariness amounts to a wrong, and to whom, is the question addressed in Section 3.
2.1 The Sovereignty-Identity Mismatch
The term sovereignty-identity mismatch is used here to denote the condition whereby the civic container (the geographic border) no longer approximates the civic contents (the measured alignment of the governed). The condition is not novel in kind. It has obtained wherever borders were fixed by conquest or colonial fiat without regard to the alignment of the populations enclosed within them. What is novel is its visibility, as populations within a single border can now be observed to hold divergent cognitive and value profiles, whilst populations in different states may share more civic alignment with one another than either shares with its immediate neighbours.
Three observable patterns evidence the mismatch. The first is intra-national polarisation, in which holders of the same passport occupy opposing civic positions. As a result, the democratic premise that a single governance structure can represent a single population is visibly weakened, and gerrymandering and legislative gridlock are better understood as symptoms of the mismatch than as its causes. Psychographic research likewise finds that urban residents can resemble the residents of distant cities more closely than their own rural neighbours (Pew Research Center 2014). The second pattern is trans-national alignment, in which individuals in different jurisdictions find greater civic affinity with one another than with their compatriots. The network-state literature records this phenomenon, but lacks the instruments to specify what alignment means beyond self-selection (Srinivasan 2022). The third is the decline of institutional legitimacy, evidenced by the erosion of trust in national institutions across democracies over several decades (Edelman 2024), which is the same separation as it appears to those within the container. Consequently, the three patterns are better understood as a single phenomenon observed from three positions, in each of which the container no longer predicts its contents.
The colonial record demonstrates the mechanism in its most extreme form. The Berlin Conference of 1884 to 1885 partitioned Africa among European powers without regard to the alignments of the populations enclosed. Mamdani (2001) traces how the resulting categories – the administrative division between the rights-bearing urban ‘citizen’ and the customary rural ‘subject’ – bore no relationship to the social organisation of the governed, and how those categories later supplied the classificatory infrastructure through which the Rwandan genocide was carried out. The mechanism Mamdani identifies is an externally imposed classification detached from what it purports to track. It was not confined to the colony, and operated equally in the metropole, where relative homogeneity, limited mobility and the scarcity of information concealed it. As those conditions have eroded, Belgium’s linguistic partition, the Catalan independence movement and the division of Kurdish populations across four sovereign states evidence the same detachment at a lower intensity. Mamdani’s analysis is historically specific, and the generalisation drawn here exceeds its claims. The colonial case nonetheless remains uniquely catastrophic in its consequences, albeit not unique in its structure.
The classificatory failure has a legal analogue. The distinction in International Humanitarian Law between International and Non-International Armed Conflict was designed for territorial states. However, twenty-first-century warfare (transnational insurgency, cyber operations and proxy conflict conducted by non-state actors across jurisdictions) produces conflicts the binary cannot classify, and states have exploited the resulting gaps (Crawford & Pert 2020). The jus soli/jus sanguinis dichotomy fails in the same manner. It was designed for a world in which civic identity was either territorial or hereditary, and it is therefore unable to classify belonging that is transnational and identity-driven, with the consequence that populations whose alignment is real are left without legal recognition. Both classifications were designed for a Westphalian order of discrete territorial states, and both misclassify the actors and communities that extend across them.
None of this implies that geographic power has dissolved. Brzezinski (1997) is correct that armies, energy and trade continue to move through territory, and that is not disputed here. The claim is confined to the observation that the proxy which assigns civic membership has separated from the person to whom it is assigned, whatever remains true of the territorial distribution of force.
The interstellar case marks the limit of that separation. A child born in a Mars settlement to parents of different Earth nationalities faces a citizenship question that jus soli cannot coherently answer, as Mars is not sovereign territory. Jus sanguinis can only resolve the question arbitrarily, according to which parent’s nationality takes precedence (Haqq-Misra 2023). The significance of the case does not depend upon settlement being imminent. At a sufficient distance, the territorial proxy has no referent whatsoever, which demonstrates that it was always a proxy for the person. The terrestrial patterns documented above are the same separation at a shorter range, differing only in degree.
Nor is the founding question speculative, as it already arises on Earth for persons whose formation and whose descent are tied to different states. Consider the case of a British national born and raised in the Emirates by British parents (personal communication with the author, October 2026). Emirati nationality law confers citizenship by descent through a paternal line settled in the federation by 1925 (United Arab Emirates, Federal Law No. 17 of 1972, Article 2), and neither length of residence nor depth of formation counts towards it. British law correctly classifies him as a citizen by descent. However, that status ends one generation later, because a citizen by descent cannot ordinarily transmit citizenship to a child who is also born abroad (United Kingdom 1981, s. 2(1)(a)). Lori (2019) describes the Gulf’s long-settled non-citizens as held in permanent temporariness, and the British national’s own account shows that the condition persisted after he left. ‘The permanent temporariness of the Emirates came at the cost of a well-founded sense of permanence in my “other” home,’ he writes, and in the place where he now lives he ‘always feel[s] like a tourist.’ Pollock, Van Reken & Pollock (2017) term this figure the ‘hidden immigrant,’ a person who resembles the majority culture in appearance whilst thinking differently from it. Every record agrees about him, yet none of the classifications that bind him takes any account of where he was formed. A Mars-born child of British parents would be in the same position, being British by descent and formed elsewhere.
Conversely, some states have begun to address the problem from the other direction. Italy’s reform of 2025 ended claims by descent without generational limit. A person born abroad who holds another nationality is now treated as never having been Italian, unless a parent or grandparent held only Italian citizenship or a citizen parent lived in Italy for two years before the birth, and the change was presented as a limit determined by genuine connection (Italian Republic 2025). Whatever its motive, the reform moves a descent rule towards the span of lineage that a family still remembers and practises – a distinction developed in Section 8.7.
Thus, the mismatch establishes that the border has separated from the person. It makes visible an arbitrariness that was present in the arrangement from the outset, and was concealed only for as long as the mismatch remained low. That visibility is an epistemic fact, and its normative significance is yet to be established. Section 3 therefore considers whether an arbitrary civic classification wrongs the person it classifies and, if so, what right exists against it.
3. From Recognition to Entitlement
Section 2 established that geographic sovereignty misclassifies the populations it governs, although that finding is a diagnosis only. Jus identitatis claims a right. However, a demonstration that civic containers no longer approximate their contents establishes only that a classification has become inaccurate, and inaccuracy does not of itself amount to injustice. This section therefore proceeds in four steps. Firstly, it identifies the wrong that arbitrary civic classification does to the person classified. Secondly, it converts that wrong into an entitlement by way of the republican account of freedom. Thirdly, it specifies who holds the entitlement and who bears the corresponding duty. Lastly, it delimits what the entitlement permits. The derivation is independent of the measurement programme proposed in later sections, because a right whose existence depended upon the predictive validity of an instrument would not be a right at all.
3.1 Classification Against Manifestation
Honneth (1995) argues that identity is constituted through relations of recognition, and that a failure of recognition injures a person’s practical relation to self rather than amounting to a distributional unfairness. Taylor (1994, 25–26) states the point in political terms, contending that misrecognition ‘can inflict a grievous wound,’ ‘imprisoning someone in a false, distorted, and reduced mode of being.’ Each of the four bases identified in Section 1 inflicts that harm structurally and without malice. Birth coordinates, parentage, the capacity to pay and self-declaration each substitute a proxy for the person and treat it as constitutive, which is the operation this paper terms capture. Recognition and capture are thus the two relations available between a polity and the identity of the person it classifies. Recognition theory identifies the harm with precision, but does not proceed further. It provides no account of who bears what obligation to whom, and it under-specifies the remedy, since an appeal to the better judgement of a classifier leaves intact the very discretion at issue. Consequently, the harm motivates the right but does not derive it.
Nonetheless, the claim that every birthright basis is merely a proxy overstates the position, and a concession is required before the derivation proceeds. Where a self is partly constituted by the narrative within which it is lived, as MacIntyre (1981) and Schechtman (1996) argue, much of that narrative is inherited before it is chosen, and descent accordingly tracks something real. Ricoeur (1992) distinguishes identity as sameness (the capacity to be re-identified as the same thing over time) from identity as selfhood (the keeping of faith with oneself through a story one continues to tell and enact), and an inherited story pertains to the latter.
However, the concession does not rescue birthright classification, because inheritance reaches a person in two distinct ways. Connerton (1989) distinguishes incorporating practices, which are performed and retained in the body, from inscribing practices, which are written down and stored. A dish cooked as a mother cooked it, an accent, a prayer or a manner of greeting is lineage that is carried. By contrast, a register entry recording where a grandfather settled is lineage that is recorded, and it is relied upon whether or not the person carries any of what it records. A descent rule relies upon the inscription. It classifies by sameness, as a marker re-identified across generations, and designates the result belonging, although belonging is properly a matter of selfhood. Carried lineage admits of recognition because the person manifests it, whereas recorded lineage admits only of capture. The distinction concedes that inheritance matters and denies only that a registry is the appropriate means of identifying it. Section 8.7 tests the distinction against its strongest objections.
3.2 Capture as Domination
Pettit (1997) argues that freedom consists in non-domination rather than non-interference. On this account, a person is unfree whenever another agent holds uncontrolled power over them, exercisable at will and on an arbitrary basis, regardless of whether that power is ever exercised. The slave of a kindly master remains a slave, as the kindliness is the master’s to withdraw and its continuation depends upon nothing the slave controls. Domination is therefore a structural property of a relation, irrespective of the harms inflicted within it.
Civic classification is a relation of this kind. Whether the basis is soil, blood, wealth or an accepted self-declaration, an authority determines a person’s civic status on a basis the person does not control, cannot contest on its merits and did not choose. That the determination is ordinarily benign is as immaterial as the master’s kindliness, because the power remains uncontrolled. Thus, birth-based classification is more than an inaccurate means of determining who a person is. It amounts to an arbitrary power over what a person is permitted to be in civic terms, and it leaves them unfree in that respect whether or not the power is ever used against them.
This completes an inference that Section 2 could not complete on its own. Polarisation and trans-national alignment do not establish that territorial coercion is illegitimate; they establish only that the proxy has separated from the person, which makes an arbitrariness observable without creating it. The illegitimacy resides in the classifying power itself. That power was uncontrolled in the metropole as in the colony, and under low mismatch as under high. Mismatch therefore reveals the domination without producing it. Consequently, the structural failure of geographic sovereignty is a failure of freedom as well as of fit, and for that reason it cannot be remedied by redrawing borders.
Two adjacent arguments confirm the form of this inference without supplying it. Abizadeh (2008) contends that a state’s border regime coerces outsiders as well as members, and that the coercion of any person gives rise to a demand that the regime be justifiable to them. However, coercion is the narrower basis, and the border the narrower site. Domination also extends to the person who is never turned away and never detained, but whose status was fixed at birth by an authority answerable to nobody for that decision. Whelan (1983) demonstrates that the boundary problem admits of no democratic solution, as a demos cannot vote upon its own composition without presupposing it. Non-domination does not solve that problem. Rather, it removes the demand that gave rise to it. Where the objection to arbitrary boundaries is that arbitrary power is a form of unfreedom, the remedy cannot be a procedure for identifying the uniquely correct demos, which Whelan shows cannot exist. It must instead be a constraint upon how any demos exercises classificatory power over any person whatsoever.
3.3 The Right-Holder
The right-holder follows from the republican account without further argument. Domination is a relation of subjection, in that a person is dominated by being subject to uncontrolled power and not merely by being affected when that power happens to be exercised. Whoever is subject to a civic classification therefore holds the right against its arbitrary exercise in respect of that classification, whether or not they are already a member of any polity. Goodin (2007) arrives at the same conclusion from a different direction, distinguishing the constituency of all affected interests from the constituency of all subjected persons. Whatever the difficulties at the outer boundary of the affected constituency, on which no position need be taken here, both constituencies include the person whose status is being decided. That case is disputed by no party to the boundary debate, and it is the only case the derivation requires.
The content of the right is procedural, as it requires that classificatory power over oneself be controlled. Four conditions specify what control entails, although they are not of equal rank, and the argument later turns upon that distinction. Two are constitutive of non-arbitrary power. A classification must be contestable, meaning that it can be challenged on its merits before a body independent of the classifier, and answerable, meaning that it is exercised on stated grounds. Where both are absent, the term ‘controlled’ has no content, whoever the classifier may be. The third condition extends the first two through time. A person who changes, as identity does, is not controlled by a classification determined once and never reopened, and the classification must therefore also be revisable; Section 7 shows that revisability is the mechanism of civic migration and is not a mere formality. The fourth condition, that a classification be exit-permitting, is of a different kind. Exit dissolves the relation within which the power is held but does not make that power non-arbitrary, and it is therefore an alternative route to non-domination and not a component of control. Exit suffices where it is genuinely free of penalty. However, it is unavailable in principle to a person whom a classifier reaches regardless of consent, since nobody can exit being classified by a state as an alien. Where exit is structurally unavailable, its function passes to a more demanding form of contestation, and where a classifier is able to provide exit, its absence is not excused. Section 3.4 demonstrates that the latter is the position of the polity this paper proposes.
Positive law already recognises an entitlement of this form. The census judgment of the German Federal Constitutional Court (Bundesverfassungsgericht 1983) established the right to informational self-determination, by which the individual controls what is known and recorded about them. The decision is not ordinarily regarded as a theory of membership, yet its structure is the structure derived here: classificatory power over a person is presumptively the person’s own to control, and an authority exercising it must justify that exercise to the person concerned. The entitlement is therefore not novel in kind. What is novel is its extension from the informational domain to the civic, that is, from what may be recorded about a person to what a person may be held to be.
The right-holder so defined includes a population that discussions of membership tend to overlook. The urgent case in this paper is the stateless and displaced person considered in Section 7, and the general case is every person classified. Between the two is the population Section 1 termed not stateful, which comprises those the literature calls ‘third culture kids,’ the long-settled non-citizens of the Gulf (Lori 2019; Vora 2013) and citizens by descent who were formed abroad. Their papers are in order, and they are not stateless, yet none of the statuses they hold corresponds to the lives those statuses govern. Naming the condition extends the right from the margin of membership to its centre, because the harm against which the right is directed is not confined to those who hold nothing. The case set out in Section 2.1 shows how the condition arises. Neither of the rules that bind that person is wrong on its own terms, but together they leave him temporary in both countries. A classification may therefore dominate in combination where no single classifier is answerable for the combination.
3.4 The Duty-Bearer
The correlative duty falls upon whoever holds classificatory power. It requires that this power be rendered controlled, and it does not require that anyone be admitted. That limit follows from the derivation and is not a retreat from it, as a duty to admit disposes of goods that a non-territorial polity does not hold. Stilz (2019) grounds territorial rights in occupancy (a preinstitutional interest in the place around which a life is built) together with collective self-determination. Stilz also expressly declines to justify every prerogative states presently claim, identifying immigration control as requiring separate argument. Moore (2015) reaches a parallel limit from a different premise by locating territorial rights in the self-determination interest of a people. A cooperative of the identity-aligned, drawn from across existing peoples, is not a people in the sense Moore intends, and it holds no occupancy interest in the sense Stilz intends. Consequently, it has no standing to decide the place-bound interests with which admission decisions are concerned. It cannot confer territory, work rights or non-refoulement, nor can it bear a duty to provide what it is unable to confer.
The internal duties of such a cooperative are nonetheless demanding, and more demanding than those of the state. Blake (2001) and Nagel (2005) both hold that the thick obligations of justice arise from shared subjection to a common coercive order, while those outside that order are owed something thinner. The coercive reach of a jus identitatis cooperative extends exactly as far as its membership and its instrument. That is the principled basis upon which the cooperative must extend contestation, answerability, revisability and exit to every person it classifies, while being bound to admit nobody.
The asymmetry between the cooperative and the state follows from the ranking of the conditions in Section 3.3. Contestability, answerability and revisability require nothing of a classifier beyond its own institutional choices. They may at times be expensive, but they are never structurally impossible, and expense does not excuse their absence. Exit alone depends upon third parties. No state can make exit from citizenship free of penalty, since leaving a nationality requires another state to receive the person, and no state can determine whether that reception occurs. The classificatory arm of the state is therefore under a duty of reform in respect of the first three conditions, while its failure in respect of exit is excused by impossibility but remains a failure. Conversely, the cooperative is able to satisfy all four conditions by its own choices. Membership is supplementary – a member who leaves reverts to the citizenship they never surrendered, and exit costs the cooperative nothing beyond the member. As power is uncontrolled wherever a feasible control is withheld, all four conditions bind the cooperative without exception. A jus identitatis polity is consequently held to a stricter standard than the state it supplements, and by the same argument that condemns the state.
Carens (2013) serves as both a model and a caution. Carens reasons from where institutions presently stand and not from an ideal origin, and yet required a book-length argument to proceed from liberal premises to open borders; a right against domination will not yield a duty of admission within a single section. Nor does the right deny the legitimacy of national self-determination and of special obligations among co-nationals, which Miller (1995) and Tamir (1993) defend. It constrains the classificatory arm of a polity, and says nothing against the polity’s existence or its shared life.
Renan (1882) supports the argument in this respect, although the limits of that support must be stated. Renan rejected race, language, religion and geography as the basis of a nation, and located it instead in two things held together: a common legacy of memories and a present consent to live together, which the lecture terms a daily plebiscite. A rule of descent retains the first of these in the fixed form of a registry, and abandons the second entirely. The revisability condition restores what was abandoned, since a classification open to revision is one to which the person continues to consent. However, Renan’s limits are as instructive as his insight. Renan held forgetting, and even historical error, to be essential to the making of a nation, and that admission carries a warning. Birthright rules persuade because they are told as stories, and a story persuades more readily than any record. A framework seeking assent against them therefore faces a constraint the liberal nationalist is entitled to press, and Anderson (1983) makes the same point in respect of print in the account of the imagined community. The right leaves the story with the people who tell it, and objects only where a registry is substituted for the story.
Classifications also compound in a manner that the duty as so far described does not address. The duty falls upon each authority in respect of its own rule, yet the case in Section 2.1 presents a harm produced by two rules together, neither of which belongs to any single classifier, and a joint duty across states would correspond to no institution that presently exists. The more defensible reading extends answerability. Each classifier answers for its own rule, but the contestation of that rule must permit the person to place their other classifications before the reviewing body. A rule is then judged by its effect upon the person it actually binds and not upon an imagined subject held by no other state. The contention of Abizadeh (2008) that a border regime must be justifiable to outsiders is strengthened here, since the outsider may also be a citizen whom another state’s rule has already left temporary.
One implication of the derivation bears directly upon the framework this paper proposes. A jus identitatis polity that measured people on an instrument they could not contest, could not compel to answer, could not revise and could not exit would dominate them more intimately than the state does. Its proxy would more closely resemble the person, and its authority would be correspondingly harder to refuse, and in that case accuracy would aggravate the wrong, since Section 3.5 shows that accuracy cannot cure it. The right derived here is consequently not a justification for the framework. It is the standard against which the framework is judged in Section 8.
3.5 Independence from the Instrument
The derivation nowhere appeals to the accuracy of any measurement, and this is a structural feature of the argument. The wrong of capture lies in the process by which a classification is imposed and not in the accuracy of what is imposed. A perfectly accurate instrument applied arbitrarily dominates the person it describes correctly. By contrast, a crude instrument applied contestably, answerably and revisably (with exit preserved) dominates nobody whatever its errors, because each of those errors remains open to correction by the person it misdescribes.
Two consequences follow from this independence. Firstly, the empirical programme of Section 9 bears upon whether measured identity is a useful basis for civic membership and never upon whether the right exists. Were the four dimensions to fail, jus identitatis would be abandoned as a governance proposal, while the right would remain available against the instrument that had classified people badly. Secondly, the right is available to those who hold nothing else. Arendt (1951) observed that rights presuppose political membership, such that the stateless lose not particular rights but the standing within which rights are held. Classification is prior to membership as membership is prior to rights, and a right against arbitrary classification is accordingly a right over the precondition of the precondition. This explains why a person with no membership whatsoever can hold it, and why Section 7 finds the displaced already subject to the classification against which it protects.
4. Jus Identitatis: The Framework
Section 3 derived a procedural right against arbitrary civic classification, which requires that classificatory power over oneself be contestable, answerable, revisable and exit-permitting. This section sets out the framework that would satisfy it. Jus identitatis is the principle that civic belonging can be recognised from measured alignment between an individual’s identity and the identity composition of a community, instead of being assigned on the basis of a proxy. It is advanced here as the institutional form the derived right takes once a polity classifies by identity. Five properties distinguish it, each of which gives concrete form to one or more of the conditions of control, and the framework is therefore answerable to the right.
The alignment is measured, as it is derived from assessment rather than self-report. A measured basis can be shown to the person, and a person shown the grounds of their classification is able to contest them; this property therefore allows a classification to state its grounds and to be challenged upon them. Self-selection cannot provide this and is a weaker signal than it appears. It is unreliable, because it confounds the reason for joining (opportunity, prestige, convenience) with the alignment that joining is supposed to evidence. It also produces adverse selection, attracting the most ideologically committed rather than the most civically complementary, and moving communities towards enclave extremes (Sunstein 2009).
The alignment is continuous, forming a gradient of belonging probability in place of a determination that a person is either inside or outside. In this respect, it is analogous to the Functional Overlapping Competing Jurisdictions of Frey & Eichenberger (1996), in which a person may hold standing in several units simultaneously. A gradient contains the dimensional information upon which a classification can be contested, whereas a binary does not.
The alignment is revisable, as individuals are reassessed periodically, and alignment changes as both person and community change. This property satisfies the revisability condition directly, and distinguishes the framework from jus soli, which fixes belonging at birth, and from jus sanguinis, under which belonging is inherited and cannot change. Revisability is also the mechanism of the civic migration developed in Section 7.
The alignment is complementary, encompassing both shared orientation and beneficial difference. A community can thereby be composed for cognitive diversity on some dimensions, while cohering on others – the diversity Landemore (2020) contends is the epistemic basis of democratic judgement.
The alignment is supplementary, in that jus identitatis adds an identity layer to existing citizenship without replacing jus soli or jus sanguinis, and no individual forfeits existing citizenship by participating. Supplementarity is what secures exit. A member who can revert to a prior citizenship can leave the identity polity without becoming stateless, which converts the exit condition from a promise into a guarantee.
Taken together, the five properties render an identity classification controlled in the sense Section 3 requires, as it is grounded, open to challenge, open to revision and possible to leave. Where a property falls short of a condition, the shortfall is a charge against the instrument and not a qualification of the right, and Section 8 holds the framework to that standard.
The framework also addresses a gap that its closest alternatives leave open. Shachar (2009) proposes jus nexi, which is citizenship earned through demonstrated social connection (residence, work, relationships). It is the most developed existing alternative to the birthright binary, yet it requires territorial presence and takes account only of alignment already manifested in behaviour. Srinivasan (2022) grounds network-state membership in ideological self-selection, which reflects shared conscious values but not the dimensions that lie beneath self-report. The supplementary citizenship of the European Union demonstrates that layers of belonging can coexist, although it remains derivative of territorial membership in a member state. Jus nexi asks what a person has done and infers belonging from the answer. By contrast, jus identitatis asks who the person is at present, and measures belonging directly, such that it is portable and prospective where connection is territorial and retrospective. A mature regime might combine the two, with connection validating measurement, and measurement extending to those whose ties have been severed by displacement.
4.1 The Transactional Turn: Jus Pecuniae
One alternative basis has operated at commercial scale for four decades, and a survey that omitted it would misrepresent the field. Jus pecuniae, or membership in exchange for money, denotes the practice whereby a state confers citizenship upon payment, whether by donation to a sovereign fund or by prescribed investment. St Kitts and Nevis established the first such programme in 1984. Surak (2023) documents an industry conducting in the order of fifty thousand naturalisations annually, with programme receipts constituting a third or more of government revenue in the smallest participating states (Surak 2024). It is the first sustained attempt to assign membership by a criterion other than birth, and its failure is therefore instructive.
The doctrinal standing of the practice is considerably weaker than its scale suggests. No state’s nationality law frames payment as a basis of acquisition equivalent to jus soli and jus sanguinis; in every implementation, the legal form is a discretionary naturalisation to which a price has been attached. The lesser tier, the investment residence permit, shows the same fault. The United Kingdom, Ireland, Portugal and Spain closed or curtailed their golden-visa routes between 2022 and 2025, after questioning the economic benefit of the purchased status (United Kingdom 2022), its continuing suitability (Ireland 2023) or its effect upon housing (Portugal 2023; Spain 2025; Government of Spain 2025), while, over the same period, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United States expanded a priced residence tier and were content to sell the status as such (United Arab Emirates 2022; Saudi Arabia 2024; Bahrain 2025; United States 2025). The decisive intervention came in Commission v Malta, in which the Grand Chamber of the Court of Justice of the European Union held that granting nationality in exchange for predetermined payments amounts to the commercialisation of that nationality, and of Union citizenship with it, in a manner incompatible with the solidarity and sincere cooperation the Treaties presuppose (Court of Justice of the European Union 2025). The Court declined to impose a freestanding genuine-link requirement, as the fault it identified was the commodification of membership and not the absence of connection. Malta responded by closing its programme and legislating a merit-based replacement.
The practice has a defence which should be stated in its strongest form. Kochenov (2019) argues that citizenship is itself an arbitrary inheritance, distributed by lotteries of birthplace and parentage that no theory of justice would design. On this view, a purchased citizenship is no more arbitrary than an inherited one, and is more transparent about its terms. However, the force of the argument is asymmetric. Demonstrating that the existing bases are arbitrary establishes the case for a less arbitrary basis of belonging, and not for the addition of a second arbitrary one. The consistency argument thus succeeds as a critique of birthright, and fails as a defence of sale. The record of effectiveness confirms this, as Surak (2023) finds that investor citizens almost never relocate to the conferring state, and that the purchased passport functions as a mobility instrument and an insurance policy, and not as membership in any substantive sense.
For the present framework, the significance of jus pecuniae is diagnostic. Wealth is a third accident alongside birthplace and parentage, and the capacity to pay is no more informative about a person’s governance orientation or relationship to the commons than the coordinates of their birth. Payment therefore prices membership without any reference to the person. That is the failure the derived right identifies – a classification imposed through a proxy the person cannot contest on its merits. The Court of Justice and the jus nexi of Shachar (2009) arrive at the same conclusion from opposite directions, the former holding that nationality presupposes a solidarity that payment cannot constitute, and the latter grounding belonging in a connection for which payment cannot substitute. Jus pecuniae consequently enters the taxonomy as a cautionary example, demonstrating that the criterion must be the person.
5. Civic Identity as a Measurement Domain
Section 3 derived a right against arbitrary civic classification without specifying what a non-arbitrary classification would measure. It had no need to do so, since the wrong of capture lies in the process of classification. This section identifies that content, which is both the domain a controlled classification would measure and the domain the right protects.
The domain is termed here ‘civic identity,’ being the set of individual differences that determine how a person relates to collective governance, shared resources, authority and the formation of polities. Existing instruments do not measure it. Personality inventories measure trait structure (Big Five, HEXACO), values scales measure priorities (Schwartz 2012), moral-foundations research measures intuition (Haidt 2012), and political-attitude scales measure position. However, none of them measures the orientations that determine whether a person can share in governing a community, which are how a person understands the source of legitimate authority, how they relate to a commons, how they believe collective decisions should be reached and how they accommodate plurality within a collective. Four dimensions correspond to these orientations, and this paper terms them Authority Source, Commons Relationship, Governance Preference and Pluralism Processing. A fifth, Sovereignty Orientation, is not a further input alongside the other four. It is the highest-order orientation, and it conditions the others, as the position a person takes on where autonomous self-governance begins and ends determines the civic meaning of each of the remaining dimensions. Morrison (2026b) derives it and advances its precedence over the others as a testable hypothesis.
The dimensions are derived as self-model parameters in Morrison (2026b), and need only be named here as the domain the right protects. Their measurement is a separate matter, as the construction of the instrument, its calibration and its validation belong to the generative measurement model of Morrison (2026a), which this paper brackets. The present argument requires only that the domain exists, that it is distinct and that it is the object a controlled classification would be required to measure. One constraint upon any such instrument follows from the right itself. Each dimension must be measured as a distribution across positions and never as a single categorical assignment, which preserves the plurality Sen (2006) holds to be constitutive of a person, and avoids the reduction to a single identity that arbitrary classification performs.
6. The Cooperative as Identity Polity
Section 3.4 established that the duty against arbitrary classification binds the cooperative this paper proposes as fully as it binds the state. This section demonstrates how the structure of the cooperative discharges that duty. Its purpose is not to defend the framework, which Section 8 evaluates, but to show that the legal vehicle is constructed to meet the standard the right sets.
The legal vehicle for jus identitatis communities is the Limited Cooperative Association, as established under frameworks such as the Uniform Limited Cooperative Association Act. The form supports non-geographic membership, contribution-based participation, member-governed ethics and distributed decision-making, and it draws on over 150 years of cooperative legal precedent and the seven International Cooperative Alliance principles. Ostrom (1990) sets out eight design principles for long-enduring commons institutions, and these correspond directly to the structure of the cooperative. They range from clearly defined membership boundaries and collective-choice arrangements to graduated sanctions, conflict resolution and nested local nodes within a global body. Each principle identifies a mechanism the vehicle must provide, and the cooperative provides each of them without amendment.
Three structural features discharge the duty, each corresponding to a distinct limb of the right. Firstly, contribution-based participation distributes returns according to a member’s activity in the cooperative’s purpose and not according to capital or tenure, and standing therefore depends upon ongoing engagement. Hirschman (1970) observes that loyalty delays exit in order to give voice time to work, and this structure builds that time into the economics of membership. Secondly, non-transferable membership prevents belonging from being sold, inherited or delegated. It gives effect to the lesson drawn from jus pecuniae in Section 4.1, that a status which is priced or bequeathed is not determined by reference to the person, and it ensures that classification corresponds to who a member is and remains revisable as they change. Lastly, member-governed ethics vests the power to amend the instrument and its rules in the membership by supermajority. The grounds of classification are thereby stated, answerable and open to challenge before a body composed of the classified themselves. Consequently, contestation, answerability, revisability and exit become properties of the vehicle itself.
Existing international law already recognises the legitimacy of non-territorial self-governance and self-determined membership, albeit in a delimited domain. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations 2007) affirms the right to maintain distinct institutions alongside state citizenship (Article 5), to determine one’s own membership (Article 33) and to sustain cooperation across borders among peoples divided by international frontiers (Article 36). Jus identitatis extends the structural principle that non-territorial, self-determined membership is a legitimate form of political organisation. It does so while acknowledging that indigenous rights are premised upon prior occupation and historical injustice, which is a foundation the framework neither shares nor claims.
The cooperative need not remain a cooperative. It may develop through four phases of increasing civic function. In the first phase, it is a civic institution governing its members and their data, with a legitimacy that is wholly internal, and in the second, it becomes a source of civic influence, consulted by external bodies by virtue of a democratic mandate such bodies typically lack. In the third, it may provide quasi-sovereign functions such as identity verification and crisis coordination, and in the fourth, it may become a proto-polity with its own economy, ethics and credential system. The trajectory is contingent upon demonstrated competence and sustained member consent, and it requires no acquisition of territory. Every phase therefore depends upon the same continuous consent the right requires, and each resists entrenchment against that consent.
Nothing in this development claims territory or contests the sovereignty of any state. A non-territorial association that claims no land exercises no more than freedom of association, which international law plainly permits, although the framework rests nothing further upon that observation. The ambition of the cooperative is instead to become the first classifying authority whose power over civic identity is, by construction, controlled by those it classifies.
7. Civic Migration and the Refugee Application
The most novel conceptual contribution of jus identitatis may be a phenomenon that no existing political philosophy has articulated, which is civic migration without physical movement. Where civic belonging is identity-based and identity is periodically reassessed, a person’s civic community can change without the person moving. Their identity vector shifts, their belonging probability with the current community declines, and their alignment with another community rises, such that they have migrated across identity space without crossing any border. This is the revisability mechanism identified in Section 3.3, and it is the positive aspect of the same right, as a classification that corresponds to manifestation accommodates a change in the person rather than penalising it.
Civic migration requires a distinction that geographic sovereignty conflates, between belonging-by-history (a member since 2010) and belonging-by-alignment (a present vector aligned with the community). The two diverge once location ceases to serve as the proxy for identity, because location changes slowly and identity need not. Parfit (1984) poses the analogous problem for persons, asking whether a thing whose every component is gradually replaced remains the same thing. Similarly, a citizen whose vector changes far enough across reassessments may no longer be the same citizen in any sense relevant to alignment, although the same person biographically. Jus identitatis makes this change governable without preventing it, and provides an infrastructure through which a person’s civic standing corresponds to who they are becoming instead of fixing them to who they were.
The right is most urgent where the person holds least. The more than 120 million forcibly displaced, and the 4.4 million whose statelessness leaves them without any functional citizenship (UNHCR 2025), are the decisive case. This is not because the cooperative can admit them, which it cannot, but because they are already classified without control. Registration upon displacement is an intensive act of classification (iris scans, fingerprints, security screening, vulnerability categorisation). None of it is meaningfully consented to, and all of it serves the security and caseload interests of the administering state and not the interests of the person. That is uncontrolled power over civic status exercised on a basis the person cannot contest, and it amounts to domination in the sense defined in Section 3.2.
The right therefore applies to the displaced person directly and provides what registration withholds, which is contestation of the classification, stated grounds for it and reassessment as the person changes. Exit cannot be satisfied here for the reason given in Section 3.3, as a stateless person has no other status to revert to and there is no alternative the registering state is able to provide. Exit is consequently unavailable in principle and not merely withheld, and its function passes wholly to contestation. The first three conditions thus bear the entire weight of the right in exactly the case where the person holds least. The pertinent question is not whether the displaced are measured, as they manifestly are, but whether the measurement is theirs to control or is imposed upon them.
A related concern holds that states might use measured alignment as a weapon to select desirable profiles while consigning others to encampment. The concern is real but not novel. States already select by education, language and employability under points-based systems, and the absence of measurement makes that selection cruder and less answerable without making it less likely.
The right yields no duty to admit and does not of itself end statelessness. A cooperative of the identity-aligned holds no territory, confers no work rights and cannot guarantee non-refoulement (Section 3.4). The right it grounds governs how a person is classified and not whether a border opens, and it leaves statelessness in its material form unchanged. What the right provides is what the stateless person described by Arendt (1951) is able to hold when holding nothing else – a claim over the precondition of membership prior to membership itself, as derived in Section 3.5. Its value is that it does not lapse at the border, where the person’s other rights already have. The distinction drawn in Section 3.1 is most significant here. The displaced are those whose inscriptions are most frequently lost, whether through destroyed registries, documents burned or abandoned, or records held by the very state they fled. Yet they frequently retain their carried lineage intact, and Hirsch (2012) demonstrates that inherited memory can be strong enough to shape a generation that never experienced what it remembers. A descent rule fails such a person at the point of loss, since it can rely only upon the record they no longer hold, whereas recognition can still take account of what they carry.
Agamben (1998) provides the vocabulary for what geographic allocation produces at its limit, in the camp as the space that reduces a human being to bare life, the homo sacer held within the juridical order only as its exception. Allocation by capacity, quota or bilateral agreement treats the displaced person as a body to be housed and a case to be processed, and the civic identity that displacement removed is given no consideration. By contrast, a right against arbitrary classification addresses the person as the bearer of a contestable civic status. However, the challenge Agamben poses applies equally to the framework itself. Any system that assigns belonging draws an inside and an outside, and thereby risks producing its own excluded remainder. Section 8 considers the extent to which the cooperative must account for that risk.
The history of psychometric testing in migration contexts is marked by colonial and exclusionary practice, in which ‘objective’ assessment has served as a veneer for national hierarchy (Shachar 2009). Self-sovereign identity proposals designed for refugees rather than with them repeat the pattern (Cheesman 2022). The strongest objection to applying the right in this domain is that refugees are assessed before they belong, and therefore cannot govern the instrument that assesses them. That objection is resolved by separating governance standing from membership. A cooperative constitution can grant assessment governance standing to any person being measured (whether a member or not), conferring a voice over the instrument used, the data retained, the criteria applied and the period of retention before any determination is made. The provision has precedent. Asylum seekers possess legal standing before citizenship, and the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations 2007, Article 33) recognises a self-determination that inheres in a community’s prior existence and not in any grant by a state. Standing of this kind changes assessment from something done to the displaced into something they help to shape, at the point where the asymmetry of power is most acute.
Two safeguards are required to make that standing operative. The first is recourse against miscategorisation, comprising the right to challenge a result before an independent reviewer, the right to reassessment after a defined interval, the right to an alternative allocation where the first produces a measurable deficit of belonging, and the right to exit the identity-based system for ordinary geographic allocation without penalty. The second is that these rights must be practically accessible and not merely formally available, which requires translation, representation funded by the cooperative and review panels that include members with lived experience of displacement. The acculturation model of Berry (1997), on which integration succeeds where a person’s orientation meets the receiving community’s openness to diversity, states the good that alignment pursues. The structure of recourse provides the freedom without which the pursuit of that good would itself amount to domination.
8. Objections and Limitations
The objections below test a right against arbitrary civic classification. In the case of the two strongest, those of Schmitt and of Rawls, the republican argument does more than answer the objection, as each is shown on examination to support the right.
8.1 The Schmittian Exception
Schmitt (1922) argues that sovereignty is defined not by laws or constitutions but by the power to decide the exception, which is the moment of crisis in which normal rules are suspended. The pertinent question is who decides the exception in an identity cooperative. The cooperative distributes that power across its membership through supermajority provisions, an independent ethics body with graduated veto authority and annual reassessment, and Schmitt would likely reject this structure as insufficiently decisive. However, non-domination reverses the challenge. The unaccountable decider Schmitt values is exactly the arbitrary power that Section 3 prohibits, and a distributed, contestable and answerable exception is accordingly the positive institutional form of non-arbitrary power. The objection nonetheless retains its force in one respect, since a distributed decision on the exception is slower, and the crises that require it do not wait. The cooperative wagers that legitimacy compensates for delay. Whether it does is an empirical question, and the failure the wager risks is paralysis and not tyranny (Ostrom 1990).
8.2 Group Polarisation and the Echo Chamber Risk
Sunstein (2009) demonstrates that ‘members of a deliberating group usually end up at a more extreme position in the same general direction as their inclinations before deliberation began.’ It could be said that identity-aligned communities amount to enclave deliberation by design. Three features of the framework mitigate this risk, although none of them eliminates it. Firstly, alignment on civic identity dimensions does not entail agreement on substantive questions, and communities formed by civic alignment therefore remain diverse on every matter the mechanism does not govern. Secondly, the Pluralism Processing dimension measures an orientation towards cognitive diversity at the level of governance values, which enables a community to select for pluralism rather than against it. Thirdly, a representational completeness metric provides a continuous indication of whether the membership is becoming homogeneous, by recording how far it spans the known diversity of civic identity instead of clustering within one region of it. Together, these features distinguish a community designed for diversity from one that drifts towards its own extreme. The deployment of Pol.is in Taiwan demonstrates that technology-mediated deliberation can identify positions that bridge divisions (Tang 2019), although its scalability remains untested.
8.3 Geographic Power Persists
Brzezinski (1997) is correct that military power, energy and trade remain geographic. Jus identitatis does not propose to transcend the grand chessboard but to supplement it. It claims the community scale, where identity alignment predicts civic experience more reliably than postal code, and concedes the geopolitical scale, where territorial power is strongest. A supporting legal argument is frequently pressed further than it will bear. The European Court of Human Rights held in Al-Skeini v United Kingdom (2011) that a jurisdiction which is primarily territorial extends to persons over whom a state exercises ‘control and authority’ abroad and to any area of which it holds ‘effective control,’ and in doing so qualified the link between jurisdiction and territory. However, the holding does not create a new non-territorial sovereignty. It applies existing sovereignty extraterritorially, which is a step short of what this framework proposes and one the case law has not taken. The claim therefore rests upon the derivation in Section 3 alone.
8.4 The Instrument and the Right of Refusal
Two objections concern the instrument. The first is that psychometric measures are not neutral but encode the categories of their designers (Zumbo & Chan 2014). At scale, an instrument does not passively measure civic identity. Rather, it constitutes what counts as civic identity, and it is in that sense a technology of governance as Foucault (2007) describes it. Member governance does not escape this, but changes its form, substituting a transparent, member-governed and revocable apparatus for an opaque, corporate and irrevocable one. The concern of parochialism is more serious. An instrument developed within a Western liberal democracy (Henrich et al. 2010) may not correspond to non-Western governance traditions, and a claim to universality cannot rest upon instruments validated only against the populations that produced them. The constitutional response is that each community validates its own dimensional structure against its own civic outcomes, with predictive validity and not agreement with existing instruments as the standard.
The second objection concerns those who decline to be measured. Any framework that makes standing conditional upon measurement must account for them, as refusal is a right by which the framework is bound and not a concession it grants. Section 3.3 established that classificatory power over a person must be exit-permitting, that is, escapable without penalty. Where the right to belong protects a person’s entry into civic recognition, its counterpart protects their departure from it. A person may contest the classification, revise it or withdraw from classification altogether, reverting to purely geographic citizenship without any diminution of their rights under jus soli or jus sanguinis. A membership that could be entered but never left would dominate exactly as assignment at birth dominates, since exit would be foreclosed and civic status returned to an authority the person cannot control. The representational completeness metric must therefore treat the unmeasured as a lasting and legitimate component of civic incompleteness, and not as a gap to be closed. The counterpart on the side of exit, the right to un-belong, is formalised as gauge restoration in the account Morrison (2026c, sec. 6.3) gives of ‘The Right to Unknow.’
Section 7 left a more difficult version of this objection outstanding. Agamben contends that every order which assigns belonging constitutes itself by producing an excluded remainder, such that the cooperative must generate its own homo sacer whatever its safeguards. The framework does not refute this. However, it denies the boundary any coercive character, as the cooperative claims no jurisdiction over the unmeasured, imposes no penalty upon them and leaves their prior citizenship intact. A person outside it stands outside a voluntary association and not outside the law, and an excluded remainder that is neither classified, coerced nor deprived of standing is not bare life. The exposure arises instead at the point of enhanced standing. Should membership come to confer advantages the unmeasured lack, they would be relatively diminished, while their prior rights remained intact, and the differential would then perform the function exclusion once performed. A cooperative whose advantages became significant enough to make refusal costly would thereby have penalised exit. It would have failed the one condition it is wholly able to satisfy by its own choices, and it would be condemned by the very right it was constructed to serve.
8.5 Sen’s Plural Identity Critique
Sen (2006) argues that identity classification enables violence by reducing irreducibly plural persons to a single category. The critique is directed at any identity-based governance, and the framework answers it by construction. Each dimension is measured as a distribution across positions, which produces a multi-dimensional profile that is plural by design. Each person therefore occupies a unique point in a continuous identity space in which similarity is always partial and never total. Sen further requires that a person retain the capacity to choose which identity is salient in a given context. No instrument may therefore reduce a plural vector to a single belonging probability that overrides the person’s own sense of what matters, and those who rely on its results (employers and governments among them) must be prohibited from extracting categorical simplifications from dimensional distributions.
The requirement may need to be stronger than a single distribution can satisfy. The British national of Section 2.1 recalls that on stepping off the plane in Dubai ‘humidity hits and the smell and the tone of light,’ and that the two worlds of his childhood ‘were psychologically distinct and compartmentalised.’ Antonsich (2010) distinguishes place-belongingness, which is the personal sense of being at home, from the politics of belonging that includes and excludes. Every rule that binds this person pertains to the latter, whereas his formation pertains to the former. A person may hold more than one arrangement of self, each of which is whole within its own setting, and a distribution averaged across them may describe someone who exists in neither. An instrument consistent with Sen would therefore retain each arrangement, and allow the person to state which applies in which context.
8.6 The Rawlsian Objection
The original position set out by Rawls (1971) appears to preclude any identity-aware system. Agents choosing principles behind a veil of ignorance, without knowledge of their identity and position, would by construction choose principles that are identity-blind. As jus identitatis is identity-aware, the objection has prima facie force, and the argument of Section 3 answers it in two ways. Firstly, the veil governs the selection of principles at the constitutional stage and not their implementation at the legislative and administrative stages. This distinction is internal to the four-stage sequence Rawls sets out, in which the veil is progressively lifted as deliberation moves from principles to application, and identity measurement operates at implementation once fair principles have been fixed. Secondly, and more decisively, a procedural right against arbitrary classification is exactly what agents behind the veil would choose. Not knowing which identity they will turn out to possess, they would secure a guarantee that, whoever they prove to be, their civic status cannot be fixed by an authority they can neither contest, compel to answer nor exit. Thus, when pressed against the framework, the Rawlsian objection becomes an argument for the right upon which the framework rests.
8.7 The Reality of Descent
The strongest reply available to the liberal nationalist holds that an inherited story is part of who a person is. On that view, a rule of descent tracks something constitutive, and the charge of capture fails. Section 3.1 conceded the premise and drew the distinction between lineage carried and lineage recorded, and three further considerations demonstrate that the distinction holds.
The first consideration is time. Assmann (2011) distinguishes communicative memory (the memory a family transmits through talk and practice across three or four generations) from cultural memory, which is held in institutions, texts and monuments over centuries. A descent rule that tracked carried lineage would extend approximately as far as communicative memory extends, and, beyond that point, it can only rely upon the inscription. The two rules described in Section 2.1 fall on opposite sides of that span. The British rule stops at the second generation born abroad, which is short of the limit of living memory, and it can therefore sever a lineage that is still being carried. The Emirati rule is premised upon settlement by 1925, a date now at the outer limit of living memory and beyond it for every later claimant, and what it relies upon is the family book. The Italian reform of 2025 moves its rule towards the span of living memory, which suggests that states are capable of drawing the distinction.
The second consideration is law. In Nottebohm, the International Court of Justice described nationality as a legal bond resting upon a social fact of attachment, a genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments, and the Court declined to give effect to a naturalisation that had the record without the fact (International Court of Justice 1955). That is the carried side of the distinction as international law states it. The Court of Justice of the European Union declined a freestanding genuine-link test in Commission v Malta (Section 4.1), and the question therefore remains open and contested. Jus identitatis does not invent the distinction. It asks that the carried side be assessed under the four conditions of control, whereas the genuine-link cases assess it at the discretion of a state.
The third consideration concerns the limits upon recognising carried lineage. Such recognition must not become a cultural examination of the kind integration tests already impose, since recognition is not examination and the person chooses what to show. Nor may it become ethnic profiling, as lineage is never inferred about a person, and counts only where the person brings it forward. Nor may it require articulacy, because many people carry a heritage they could not describe in words. The narrative self that Schechtman (1996) describes can be implicit while remaining constitutive. Consequently, what is recognised is what a person does and never what they can recite. Scott (1998) attributes the recording of lineage by registries to the difficulty of making practice legible at scale. That explains why the proxy exists, but it does not justify its use without control.
9. Validation Through Outcomes
Section 3.5 established that the right against arbitrary classification is independent of any instrument, and the empirical claim set out here accordingly sits outside the normative argument. It bears only upon whether measured identity is a useful basis for membership. This paper predicts that identity-based alignment will forecast civic outcomes (participation, belonging, cooperative behaviour) better than geographic co-location, demographic similarity or ideological self-identification. The appropriate standard is incremental predictive validity, whereby the four dimensions must forecast civic behaviour that the Big Five (Costa & McCrae 1992), political orientation and demographics do not already explain. Should the prediction fail under a pre-registered test, jus identitatis would be abandoned as a governance proposal, while the right remained intact and available against the very instrument that had failed. At present, the prediction is entirely unvalidated. Its confirmation requires an identity dataset of sufficient scale and diversity to subject the question of incremental validity to a genuinely fair test.
10. Conclusion
This paper has argued for a right and has not proposed an instrument, and it has done so in three steps. Firstly, every existing basis of civic belonging (soil, blood, wealth or self-selection) captures identity through a proxy that is substituted for the person and treated as constitutive of them. Secondly, such capture is a form of domination, whereby an authority determines what a person may be in civic terms on a basis the person does not control, cannot contest on its merits and did not choose, and leaves them unfree in that respect whether or not the power is ever used against them. Lastly, there is a right against that domination, procedural in content and held by every person classified, which requires that classificatory power over oneself be contestable, answerable, revisable and exit-permitting. The right binds the cooperative this paper proposes as strictly as it binds the state. Its most distinctive application is civic migration without physical movement, being the reconfiguration of belonging as a person changes and not as they move, and the revisability condition makes this an entitlement to be honoured instead of an anomaly to be managed.
The paper began with a child born where no state can claim the ground, and it has found the same problem already present on Earth in persons fully classified by more than one state and recognised by none of those classifications. The state classifies and people recognise. Every birthright basis records a proxy of lineage in place of the lineage a person carries, and those proxies compound across states until a person can belong nowhere with every document in order. The right against arbitrary classification exists to ensure that classification does not foreclose the recognition people confer upon one another. The instrument remains unvalidated, and the cooperative untested. The scope of this paper does not extend to either. Nonetheless, the question first posed by the interstellar case can no longer be answered by reference to the ground on which a person stands. How belonging is to be determined once that answer fails is the question the remainder of this programme must address.
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