Understanding Statelessness

Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss, Phillip Cole, Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss, Phillip Cole

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351779135
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Understanding Statelessness offers a comprehensive, in-depth examination of statelessness. The volume presents the theoretical, legal and political concept of statelessness through the work of leading critical thinkers in this area. They offer a critique of the existing framework through detailed and theoretically-based scrutiny of challenging contexts of statelessness in the real world and suggest ways forward.

The volume is divided into three parts. The first, 'Defining Statelessness', features chapters exploring conceptual issues in the definition of statelessness. The second, 'Living Statelessness', uses case studies of statelessness contexts from States across global regions to explore the diversity of contemporary lived realities of statelessness and to interrogate standard theoretical presentations. 'Theorising Statelessness', the final part, approaches the theorisation of statelessness from a variety of theoretical perspectives, building upon the earlier sections. All the chapters come together to suggest a rethinking of how we approach statelessness. They raise questions and seek answers with a view to contributing to the development of a theoretical approach which can support more just policy development.

Throughout the volume, readers are encouraged to connect theoretical concepts, real-world accounts and challenging analyses. The result is a rich and cohesive volume which acts as both a state-of-the-art statement on statelessness research and a call to action for future work in the field. It will be of great interest to graduates and scholars of political theory, human rights, law and international development, as well as those looking for new approaches to thinking about statelessness.

1 Introduction

Providing a framework for understanding statelessness

Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole

Formerly man had only a body and soul. Now he needs a passport as well, for without it he will not be treated as a human being.

(Stefan Zweig in The World of Yesterday, recalling the words of a Russian émigré)

Introduction

The above quotation from author Stefan Zweig is possibly his most famous, often cited when talking about statelessness (e.g. see Pouilly 2007, p. 19). However, it is most usefully seen in the context of the text directly preceding it. Before recalling the words above, Zweig reflects on how at one time he was an Austrian citizen, never questioning that he should be treated by officials and law enforcers alike as a gentleman and as ‘a citizen in good standing’ (Zweig 1964, p. 413). Back then, Zweig recounts, he had reflected on the beauty in statelessness, in not being beholden to any country. He recalls that he only really understood the folly of this on the day he experienced the visceral reality of statelessness for himself. It was on the day that he found himself no longer an Austrian citizen, petitioning an English official for papers (Zweig 1964, p. 413). From that moment on, he was treated with suspicion, ‘because all countries were suspicious of the sort of people of which I had suddenly become one, of the outlaws, of the men without a country’ (Zweig 1964, p. 413). From one day to the next, Zweig was transformed from someone with a strong relationship with a member of the community of States to someone with no such relationship. In that transition, Zweig was confronted with a realignment of his position in the world — of the assumptions about his eligibility for rights and for legal personhood. It was at that moment, Zweig recounts, that he was reminded of these words which had been told to him some years before, and which he had not fully understood at the time.

For those of us with a functioning and protective citizenship, it is hard to imagine quite how important this is for our lives, and indeed it is even uncomfortable to do so. Perhaps this is one reason why statelessness has been so under-studied, under-acknowledged and allowed to continue to cause problems for those affected. Yet in order to understand statelessness it is important to consider what it means for stateless persons, how persons become stateless and how they experience their statelessness. It is also important to examine how statelessness is created, how it persists and why it brings with it the deprivations it does. While much of the recent literature, both scholarly and practitioner-focused, has built upon the assumption that citizenship acquisition is the principal appropriate remedy for the problems associated with statelessness, this book finds the situation to be more complex. It focuses on understanding contemporary statelessness in historical and geographical terms. It explores how to move forward in such a way that most relieves the difficulties experienced by stateless persons, and at the same time emphasises the rational autonomy and individuality of stateless and potentially stateless persons themselves. The inclusion in this volume of six carefully selected photographs provides another route through which to challenge existing discourses and explore the reality of statelessness today.

The purpose of this introductory chapter is to locate the contents of the book which follows within wider discourses on statelessness and noncitizenship, to explain the contributions of the book’s chapters to the study of statelessness from this perspective and to draw on these contributions to offer a call-to-action agenda for future research which can continue the project of building questions of statelessness into the theorisation of rights and justice and, in turn, the question of justice into policy approaches based upon a deeper understanding of statelessness as it is lived today.

Statelessness: a pressing concern

The standard definition categorises a person as ‘stateless’ if he or she is a non-citizen everywhere. For the most part, statelessness in this book is understood in this way, though with examination also of the implications of stateless spaces (e.g. Mwangi, this volume) and stateless peoples (e.g. Bloom, this volume), for example. Statelessness is complex and multi-faceted, and this book finds that there is no singular appropriate way to respond. Part of the reason for this is that statelessness arises for many different reasons in different contexts and at different times. For example, members of some groups found themselves stateless when the construction of the modern State system after the World Wars failed to accommodate them, such as members of the Roma community in Europe or Kurds in the Middle East. Others are stateless in the aftermath of empire and decolonisation, such as Palestinians and the Tamils of Northern Sri Lanka. In some regions women experience discrimination in this or other areas which can lead to statelessness in unexpected ways, particularly when combined with administrative problems (Al Barazi and Tucker, this volume; Mulmi and Schneiderman, this volume). Still others fall into statelessness because of a mismatch in citizenship laws, or because of international events such as State collapse, or changes in law. There are also laws which permit the removal of individuals’ citizenship through denationalisation, potentially rendering them stateless (Gibney 2013).

It is generally agreed that for the most part statelessness carries with it privations and vulnerabilities that are deeply problematic, arising from the exclusion of stateless persons from the formal apparatus of States. Yet at the same time, and often neglected in debates around statelessness, it is more than merely a status of victimhood. As contributions in this book demonstrate, stateless persons should not be generally seen as passive victims of circumstance; rather, their diverse and complex ways of engaging with States and asserting claims need to be recognised. Stateless persons often navigate new forms of individual–State relationships, and examining those strategies of stateless persons draws attention to the diversity of forms of such relationships that exist, and the diversity of levels of membership that shape our political reality (Passarelli, this volume). A further complexity in the study of statelessness is that it intersects with other sources of exclusion, such as xenophobia (Kingston, this volume), which may act as a driving force of racialised policies towards some citizens (Blake, this volume). For others, aspects of statelessness arise in the claiming of memberships in the face of colonisation (Bloom, this volume).

Basic information about the global situation of statelessness is not comprehensive, with data notoriously sparse. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), within whose mandate stateless persons fall, keeps the most thorough global data, providing figures on reported numbers of stateless persons in 78 countries around the world (UNHCR 2015), though even data for these countries are unlikely to catch everyone affected in the countries concerned (ISI 2014). For example, these data may miss information relating to some groups whose members experience entrenched statelessness, responsibility for which is extremely contentious and difficult to address. While it is important to look beyond numbers, they can help to frame the situation. While UNHCR extrapolates from its data for 78 countries that there are probably at least ten million stateless persons globally (UNHCR 2015 — extrapolating from 3.7 million individuals ‘recorded by governments and communicated to UNHCR’), others argue that the number is probably significantly higher (ISI 2014), and little is known of their circumstances. With so little basic knowledge available, the paucity of theoretical literature is part of a wider gap in understanding. In turn, while statelessness remains under-discussed, the pressure and resources for better reporting and analysis will also remain weak. Frustratingly, we know that there are stateless persons, but the various and complex forms statelessness can take evade our current ways of accounting for it and theorising about it.

In 2014, UNHCR launched its ten-year #IBelong Campaign to end statelessness by 2024, and several initiatives aimed at improving data on statelessness have been developed, including the ISI The World’s Stateless report (ISI, 2014) and the forthcoming Academics Stand Against Poverty (ASAP) Report on Statelessness and Development. Each of these tries in different ways to develop a better overview of statelessness and to mainstream consideration of how statelessness impacts upon human rights and development respectively. In this book, then, the intention is not only to provide a re-examination of the theoretical approaches to statelessness but to offer analyses of contexts of statelessness which are insufficiently understood in the literature and which challenge orthodoxy in the debates surrounding statelessness.

The state of statelessness research

It is possible to trace out three key moments in thinking about statelessness: (1) after the end of the Second World War, with statelessness as exception; (2) at the beginning of the twenty-first century, with statelessness as phenomenon; and (3) more recently, with statelessness seen as endemic in, or even symptomatic of, modernity.

In the aftermath of the Second World War, concern about statelessness was most famously enunciated by Hannah Arendt, herself both a political theorist and a stateless person. Indeed, Arendt’s work is often taken as the ‘canon’ for contemporary theorisations of statelessness. However, as is argued in this book, it is necessary to look beyond Arendt’s ‘right to have rights’ to re-examine the relevance of her work to contemporary debates about statelessness (Blitz, this volume). In the 20 years or so after the end of the Second World War, which was also an important period of decolonisation and global refocusing, the discourse around statelessness seems to have included a sense of surprise. That is, statelessness is seen as an exceptional aspect of a unique moment in history, and something that can be fixed. This thinking is evidenced, for example, in the works of Paul Weis (a Harvard academic and lawyer) and Gerrit Jan van Heuven Goedhart (the first High Commissioner for Refugees), who were involved in the drafting of the Statelessness Conventions (van Heuven Goedhart 1955; Weis 1961, 1962; for discussion see also Goodwin-Gill 2011).

In the 1990s and 2000s a new global landscape was developing. This was the period after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, and then the period after the 9/11 attacks in the US. In the late 2000s, a new discourse around statelessness was beginning to emerge, coinciding with, but distinct from, developments in theorisations of migration. For migration scholars, 2008 is known for Joseph Carens’ symposium and special issue of Ethics and International Affairs considering the rights of irregular migrants, and this was also a key time for renewed engagement with statelessness. Within a widening discourse challenging the assumed scope of liberal theory’s demos were a number of important papers from around the same time (e.g. Gibney 2006; Frelick and Lynch 2005; Goris et al. 2009). Emerging at the end of that period, Kelly Staples’ 2012 book, Retheorising Statelessness, can be seen as the first book-length sustained attempt to use statelessness to critique the contemporary global framework. Meanwhile, others were drawing attention to the wider problems associated directly with the non-membership of stateless persons (e.g. Sawyer and Blitz 2011; Blitz and Lynch 2012), and to localised meanings of statelessness on the ground following crises including the break-up of the Soviet Union and of Yugoslavia (e.g. Blitz and Otero-Iglesias 2011). Added to this, processes of denationalisation were becoming the subject of sustained theoretical consideration as a specific and increasingly prominent form of statelessness (Gibney 2013; Hidalgo 2014).

The years from 2013 to 2016 have seen a substantial realignment of global approaches to citizenship and migration. This has included the development of a new approach to statelessness, including new global agreements and commitments. The 2014 UNHCR campaign mentioned above can be seen as part of this. This has involved a rethinking of systems inherited from the past, with increasing numbers of theorists and activists seeing statelessness as endemic rather than exceptional. This book sits within this third wave, but takes it a step further. Overall it characterises statelessness as perhaps even arising from the very structure of the international State system rather than a problem that can be solved by that system. Statelessness challenges the structure of the international State system and perhaps even the foundations of liberal political theory itself, so that we must look beyond the limits of these frameworks if we are going to begin to address those challenges.

Theorising statelessness

Statelessness poses a considerable challenge for dominant understandings of State-based liberal justice. It is deeply problematic for liberal understandings of justice that a significant proportion of the world’s population lives in a situation of disenfranchisement constructed by the liberal State system that was supposed to ensure universal rights and shared development (Cole, this volume). This deep and troubling challenge may account for the scarcity of discussions of statelessness in the political theoretical literature, but failing to talk about a problem as fundamental as this will not make it any less pressing. This book then also emerges out of a worry in the minds of the authors that the continuation of statelessness not only represents a troubling exclusion from rights and development for the individuals concerned but also, if not properly addressed, undermines the project of liberal political theory itself.

Theoretical disciplines in the social sciences concerned with rights and justice have been slow to address the implications of statelessness for rights, human development and the nature of States and individual–State relationships. This includes analysing statelessness not only in the abstract, but in light of its varied causes and consequences in different geographical regions. Crucially, it also requires a critical approach to the common discourses around statelessness. This book adopts a political theory which engages with a range of social sciences and humanities disciplines in order to understand the realities of statelessness today.

While few political theorists have engaged directly with statelessness, there is a broad and growing analysis of membership, identity and citizenship within the discipline. Work examining exclusions arising from migration in particular provides a useful basis for thinking about statelessness from the perspective of political theory. In this field, theorists have drawn attention to the inability of work on ethics and justice to take into account the questions raised by migration. For example, this includes critiquing the ethics of controlling migration, which can be viewed as excluding persons from access to basic rights on arbitrary grounds (Carens 1987, 2013; Risse 2008; Verlinden 2010) and the contradictions of the liberal state in permitting such exclusion (Bosniak 2008; Cole 2000; Rubio-Marin 2000). These concerns have been taken up by sociologists examining the dynamics of marginalisation and exclusion perpetuated by contemporary citizenship regimes (Isin 2004; Nyers 2006; Rygiel 2011; Sigona 2005, 2012), and by cosmopolitan theorists who have sought the extension of citizenship and justice beyond state boundaries to better account for the rights of migrants, particularly in the context of vast and dramatic global inequalities of wealth and resources (Bauböck 2007; Cabrera 2010; Caney 2006; Pogge 2010). However, the focus has predominantly been on migration, and on lack of status insofar as it is a consequence of this.

This book also sits within this theoretical tradition but moves away from the prior emphasis on migration. It follows on the heels of another volume, Theorising Noncitizenship (Tonkiss and Bloom 2015, republished in 2016), which can be seen in many ways as this book’s precursor. That book sought to re-examine the structures that allow such forms of disenfranchisement and dehumanisation to occur. Building upon this, the current volume applies this approach to the question of statelessness and contributes to a burgeoning literature examining statelessness (e.g. Aggarwal 2014). It draws on the real-world experience of statelessness to deconstruct assumptions and consider the ways in which the liberal State system both theoretically and in reality contributes to the exclusion of stateless persons from considerations of rights and justice.

Structure of the book

The three parts of this book carry the reader through three broad ways of thinking about the topic. First, the book presents the theoretical, legal and political concept of statelessness through the work of leading critical thinkers in t...