Invisible Citizens: A Comparative Theory of Misrecognition and Bedouin

ABSTRACT Recognition theory has emerged as a central framework for understanding injustice in societies marked by ethnocultural diversity, structural inequality and contested belonging. Moving beyond narrow distributive or legal accounts of inequality, recognition‐based approaches illuminate how dignity, identity and institutional status shape access to justice. This study develops a multidimensional framework of misrecognition and applies it to the marginalization of Bedouin communities in the Naqab (Negev), situating their experience within broader debates on governance, power and the reproduction of exclusion. Drawing on the complementary insights of Charles Taylor's cultural‐symbolic perspective, Axel Honneth's affective‐moral theory and Nancy Fraser's structural‐institutional critique, the article conceptualizes misrecognition as a layered process operating simultaneously through symbolic narratives, lived moral injury and institutional arrangements. Rather than treating these traditions as competing paradigms, the study demonstrates how their interaction produces patterned forms of inequality that become normalized within everyday governance. Empirically, the analysis examines interrelated arenas—including land governance, spatial planning, educational provision and family regulation—to show how symbolic exclusion, affective harm and institutional subordination mutually reinforce one another. These arenas reveal how territorial delegitimization, infrastructural inequality and stigmatizing regulation collectively sustain conditions of marginalization. The study argues that justice for Bedouin citizens cannot be reduced to distributive remedies alone; it requires symbolic inclusion, institutional restructuring and the repair of moral injury. By integrating theory and empirical analysis, the framework offers a rigorous conceptual foundation for studying marginalized populations in ethnonational and settler‐colonial contexts, positioning recognition as both a site of struggle and a condition for participatory parity.