Season 2, Ep. 10 – Statelessness: No country to call home
Show notes
Donate or Get Involved!
European Network in Statelessness (external link) .
Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (external link) .
Primero la Niñez (external link) .
Media & Blogs
Abrahamian, A.A. (5 January 2018). Who Loses When a Country Puts Citizenship Up for Sale? (external link) New York Times.
Baruah, S. (19 January 2018). Stateless in Assam (external link) . The Indian Times.
Das, S. K. (3 February 2023). The Production of Statelessness in Assam. BPB.
Frost. N. (24 December 2023). Freed From Never-Ending Detention, They Ended Up in Another Limbo (external link) . New York Times.
Gogoi, S., Chakraborty G. & Saikia, P.J. (21 March 2018). Assam against itself: a reply to Sanjib Baruah (external link) . London School of Economics and Political Science.
Hassan, M. (August 7, 2021 ). “We the Sons of Bitches Are Doing Fine”: The Dissent of Miya Poetry (external link) . Jamhoor.
Kanno-Youngs, Z. & Enecia Pérez, H. (6 October 2023). They’ve Been Stateless for 10 Years. Now Many Are Facing Deportation (external link) . New York Times.
Osborne, L. & Russell, R. (27 December 2015). Stateless in Europe: 'We are No People With No Nation'. (external link) The Guardian.
Petrozziello. (7 March 2024). Birth Registration as Bordering Practice in Fortress Europe. European Network on Statelessness.
Ratcliffe, E. (30 May 2023). Stateless Rohingya could soon be the ‘new Palestinians’, top UN official warns (external link) . The Guardian.
Sieber, C. (10 August 2023). Nomads of the Sea: Stateless Bajau Face up to a Future on Land – Photo Essay (external link) . The Guardian.
Specia, M. (23 February 2023). Shamima Begum, Who Joined ISIS as a Teen, Loses Latest Bid to Regain U.K. Citizenship (external link) . New York Times.
Stack, M. (4 August 2020). Behrouz Boochani Just Wants to Be Free (external link) . New York Times.
Stateless. (2020). Limited Series, Netflix.
Stateless (external link) . (2020). Documentary directed by Michèle Stephenson.
Reports and Policy
#IBELONG (external link) . (2014). UNHRCR.
Caribbean Migrants Observatory (external link) .
Lori, N. (2012). Temporary Workers or Permanent Migrants? The Kafala System and Contestations over Residency in the Arab Gulf States (external link) . Paris: IFRI.
Americas Network on Nationality and Statelessness.
Sustainable Development Goals (external link) . United Nations.
UNHCR. (2024). Ending Statelessness (external link) .
Books & Book Chapters
Beaugrand, C. (2017). Stateless in the Gulf: Migration, Nationality and Society in Kuwait (external link) . Bloomsbury Publishing.
Benhabib, Ş. (2018). Exile, Statelessness, and Migration: Playing Chess with History from Hannah Arendt to Isaiah Berlin (external link) . Princeton University Press.
Brennan, D., Murray, N. & Petrozziello, A. (2021). “Asking the ‘Other Questions’: Applying Intersectionality to Understand Statelessness in Europe.” (external link) . In T. Bloom & L. Kingston (Eds), Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship. Manchester University Press.
Bloom, T., Tonkiss, K. & Cole, P. (Eds). (2017). Understanding Statelessness (external link) . Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Cohen, E. F. (2018). The Political Value of Time: Citizenship, Duration, and Democratic Justice (external link) . Cambridge University Press.
Hackl, Andreas (Ed.)(2023). Permitted Outsiders: Good Citizenship and the Conditional Inclusion of Migrant and Immigrant Minorities (external link) . Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group.
Lori, Noora. 2019. Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf (external link) . Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
Lori, N. (2017). Statelessness, ‘In-Between’ Statuses, and Precarious Citizenship (external link) . In, A. Shachar, R. Bauböck, I. Bloemraad, and M. Vink (Eds), The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (742–66), Oxford University Press.
Shachar, A. (2020). The Shifting Border: Legal Cartographies of Migration and Mobility (external link) . Manchester University Press.
Siegelberg, M. (2020). Statelessness: A Modern History (external link) . Harvard University Press.
Scholarly Articles
Almustafa, M. (2018). Relived vulnerabilities of Palestinian refugees: Governing through exclusion (external link) . Social & Legal Studies, 27(2), 164-179.
Hennebry, J. & Petrozziello, A. (2019). Closing the Gap? Gender and the Global Compacts for Migration and Refugees (external link) . International Migration 57(6):115–38.
Lori, N. (2011). National Security and the Management of Migrant Labor: A Case Study of the United Arab Emirates (external link) . Asian and Pacific Migration Journal 20(3–4):315–37.
Lori, N. (2020). Time and Its Miscounting: Methodological Challenges in the Study of Citizenship Boundaries (external link) . International Journal of Middle East Studies 52(4):721–25.
Lori, N. (2022.) Possible Citizens: Migration Enforcement as the Performance of Citizenship in the United Arab Emirates (external link) . International Migration Review 56(3):727–53.
Lori, N. & Schilde, K. (2021). A Political Economy of Global Security Approach to Migration and Border Control (external link) . Journal of Global Security Studies 6(1).
Lori, N. & Schilde, K. (2021). Muddying the Waters: Migration Management in the Global Commons. (external link) International Relations 35(3):510–29.
Milton, A., Rahman, M., Hussain, S., Jindal, C., Choudhury, S., Akter, S., Ferdousi, S., Mouly, T., Hall, J. & Efird, J. (2017). Trapped in Statelessness: Rohingya Refugees in Bangladesh (external link) . International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health 14(8):942.
Parashar, A., & Alam, J. (2019). The National Laws of Myanmar: Making of Statelessness for the Rohingya (external link) . International Migration 57(1):94–108.
Petrozziello, A. (2019). Statelessness as a Product of Slippery Statecraft: A Global Governance View of Current Causes, Actors and Debates (external link) . The Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(1), 136–155.
Petrozziello, A. (2019). Bringing the Border to Baby: Birth Registration as Bordering Practice for Migrant Women’s Children (external link) . Gender & Development 27(1):31–47.
Petrozziello, A. (2019). (Re)Producing Statelessness via Indirect Gender Discrimination: Descendants of Haitian Migrants in the Dominican Republic (external link) . International Migration 57(1):213–28.
Simola, A. (2018). Lost in Administration: (Re)Producing Precarious Citizenship for Young University-Educated Intra-EU Migrants in Brussels (external link) . Work, Employment and Society 32(3):458–74.
Wooding, B. & Petrozziello, A. (2013). New Challenges for the Realisation of Migrants’ Rights Following the Haiti 2010 Earthquake: Haitian Women on the Borderlands (external link) . Bulletin of Latin American Research 32(4):407–20.
Transcript
Maggie Perzyna
Welcome to Borders & Belonging, a podcast that explores regional migration issues in a global context. This series is produced by CERC Migration in collaboration with Lead Podcasting. I'm Maggie Perzyna, a researcher with the Canada Excellence Research Chair in Migration and Integration Program at Toronto Metropolitan University. Today, we're talking about statelessness, and what it means to live without a nationality. There are millions of stateless people around the world. For many of them, accessing basic rights can be a challenge. Statelessness can occur for a variety of reasons, such as discrimination against ethnic or religious groups, gender, or as a result of nationality laws. In a moment, I'll be joined by two esteemed researchers who will help us explore the complexities behind statelessness, and the far-reaching effects it has on individuals and communities. But first, we'll take a look at what's happening in Assam, a state in northeastern India, bordering Bangladesh and Myanmar, Assam has a long history of migration and colonization.
Rintu Borah
So, whether you see it on the Eastern side or the Western side, there are many tribes in Northeast India, which trace their lineages to present day China, Myanmar, Thailand. And historically they have been coming and settling and making a home in many different parts of Northeast. On the Western side, we have seen many communities coming and settling in the river in the banks of Brahmaputra Valley or Barak Valley, be it the indentured laborers who were brought by the British administration to cultivate and grow tea plantations, or be it be the Marwari trading class who came from Rajastan or the Bengali Hindu upper middle class, who came as administrative class. And then they were these Bengali Muslim peasantry class. So, the the mainstream politics of Assam has always been centered around this question of who is an Assamese? As such, we have seen various strikes and conflicts which have really got violent and vitriolic.
Maggie Perzyna
That's Rintu Borah. He's a PhD candidate and a social theorist who grew up in Assam and has witnessed these complexities from a young age.
Rintu Borah
I am from a place called Jorhat, Assam and my father was in the defences. We travelled to all parts of India, and we have lived in different cultures, tried to, you know, understand different cultures. So, since my childhood, I was indoctrinated into different cultures, and I've learned to respect and understand the other. And as I was growing up in my own Assam, I have seen a lot of strifes and conflicts regarding identity and citizenship.
Maggie Perzyna
A lot of the strife stems from a list called the 'National Register of Citizens', or the NRC. It was created in 1951 to distinguish who was born in Assam and is Indian and who migrated from what was then East Pakistan, now called Bangladesh. In 2019, the government of India updated the list, asking people to prove their residency in Assam before 1971. Those who did not provide sufficient documentation were stripped up their citizenship, leaving almost 2 million people stateless. A lot of these people are Muslim, and face discrimination as a result of their religion and culture. Many are pejoratively referred to as 'Miya'. 'Miya' is actually an Urdu word which meaning gentleman, but over time it has become a slur used to refer to Bengali Muslims who live on the plains of the Brahmaputra River in Assam.
Rintu Borah
'Miya' is actually an Urdu term given to a Muslim person and when it came down to Brahmaputra Valley, somehow it became a derogatory term. It connotes a person who is out there to only do bad things to your society. He or she is there to you know, rape women, take away your jobs take away your land. And this fear, psychosis around this figure has been central to the politics of modern Assamese nation.
Maggie Perzyna
Over the past several years, the derogatory use of the term 'Miya' has grown in tandem with the severe consequences of becoming stateless, even before the National Register of Citizens list was finalized in 2019, people accused of residing in the country illegally were being separated from their families and sent to detention centers. But as discrimination has grown, so too has resistance and the reclamation of the word 'Miyah' through a new style of poetry.
Rintu Borah
'Miya' poetry is a resistance poetry movement, which started post 2016 when the draconian NRC process started. So, when these 'Miya' poets started writing, they started by subverting this connotation of Miya. They owned up the term and they say that, their logic was you people are, you know, kind of marginalizing us by, uh, calling us this derogatory term. Let us own up this term. The real documented event came in 2016 when the first poet, Hafiz Ahmed, he is a teacher from the community. He wrote a poem on Facebook called, 'Write down I am a Miya'. This was a derivative poem inspired by Mahmoud Darwish’s, 'Write down I'm an Arab'.
Maggie Perzyna
Here's Rintu reading an excerpt from Hafiz Ahmed's poem.
Rintu Borah
"Write Write down I am a Miya
My serial number in the NRC is 200543
I have two children
Another is coming next summer
Will you hate him As you hate me?
Write I am a Miya
I turn waste, marshy lands
To green paddy fields
To feed you.
I carry bricks
To build your buildings
Drive your car
For your comfort
Clean your drain
To keep you healthy.
I have always been
In your service
And yet you are dissatisfied!”
Maggie Perzyna
The poem inspired others in Assam to respond with their own words and talk about their own experiences with discrimination in Indian society. Within about eight months of Hafiz Ahmed's poem being published, Rintu says a sizable resistance movement was born.
Rintu Borah
So initially, the push was from these university, first generation university goers who went to take higher education in places like Delhi University, who went to places like Mumbai, went to places like Hyderabad and Bangalore got English education, and they were the ones who kind of you know, pushed push this moment.
Maggie Perzyna
But with time, the movement has expanded to include people from a cross section of society, all bringing their unique lenses to what it means to be 'Miya'.
Rintu Borah
They are a very interesting bunch. They are peasants, they are lawyers, they are journalists. They are students, they are teachers. They are river, boat persons who sings folktales. Also, folk songs. They are everyone.
Maggie Perzyna
Over the past few years, Rintu has been meeting with many of these poets to try and learn more about their lives and amplify the work that they're doing. He's also affiliated with the Community Media House, which aims to amplify the stories of media people and counter stereotypes and misinformation about some of the struggles they face. Rintu hopes that these stories will not only reach people across India, but also around the world.
Rintu Borah
We also try to collaborate internationally. See this as an opportunity for future collaborations because these people's their stories really need to be heard.
Maggie Perzyna
Many thanks to Rintu Bora for sharing his experiences working with 'Miya' poets in Assam. Joining me today to explore the causes and social realities of statelessness are Professor Noora Lori and Dr. Allison Petrozziello. Nora is a founding director of Boston University's party school initiative on forced migration and human trafficking and an associate professor of international relations at the party School of Global Studies. Allison is an instructor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs at Wilfrid Laurier University and has over 15 years of experience consulting on gender and migration for organizations such as UN Women, the ILO, Inter-American Development Bank, Caribbean Migrants Observatory, and the Association for Women's Rights and Development. Welcome to you both.
Noora Lori
Thank you. Happy to be here.
Allison Petrozziello
Hi, everyone. Thanks for the invitation.
Maggie Perzyna
So, let's dive in. What does it mean to be stateless? And how does it impact an individual's access to basic rights? Noora, let's start with you.
Noora Lori
Thank you, Hannah Arendt has a great framing about statelessness as the right or citizenship as, 'the right to have rights', and so, when you're stateless, you don't have the right to have rights and that includes, it's both membership rights and mobility rights. And so, when we think about membership rights, it's all the rights that you if you haven't recognized identity document in the state that you live might take for granted, the ability to go to the hospital to register a birth, the ability to enroll your kids in school, to get a job to open a bank account to get married. There are so many moments in our everyday life where the state actually has to authorize our access to basic services and benefits that are provided by the state that you just get locked out of if you don't have identity documents that recognize you as a member of this policy. So, statelessness means internally, you don't have membership rights. It also affects your mobility rights, by which I mean your right to cross borders. So, without identity documents issued by a state that is vouching for you that is verifying that you are who you say you are, and that you are subject of that sovereign entity. Other states do not authorize your ability to cross borders. And so in many ways, I think of statelessness as a form of like social death. You can't be where you are, and you can't move.
Maggie Perzyna
How do factors like conflict, state succession and discrimination contribute to statelessness. Allison?
Allison Petrozziello
Sure. Well statelessness as has really been re-emerging as an international concern, especially since 2014. And that's when the UNHCR launched its 10 year, 'I Belong' campaign to end statelessness. And so, that has meant that over the last decade, there's really been a growing scholarly attention and activism to address some of the root causes of this political condition which Noora just described. So, as you note, in your question, there are multiple causes, which can themselves overlap. So, you mentioned conflict, state succession, which happens when a state breaks up, as in the case of the former USSR, or Yugoslavia, and discrimination as well. So, maybe I'll just address each. So, regarding the first I'd say that statelessness continues to be closely associated with forced migration due to conflict situations. And that has to do with kind of the moment which it first emerged as an international concern, which Noora was mentioning kind of the post-World War Two moment, when Hannah Arendt and other survivors of that war began writing about their political condition, you know, they had been deprived of a nationality cast outside of political community. So, today, it's true that a lot of refugees around the world do find themselves and their children deprived or denied documents that prove a relationship to any state. And then as those situations become protracted over time, as we see in places like Syria, many millions displaced abroad, children are born, you know, into those circumstances, and then the kind of non-status or precarious status of their parents gets passed on to the next generation, unless there are concerted efforts to interrupt that cycle. Right. So that's maybe the conflict part of the answer regarding state succession. You know, sometimes conflict does result in the breakup of a country as in I think I mentioned Yugoslavia. So, when that happens, people of different ethnicities may find themselves on the so-called wrong side of the border or unable to claim a nationality in that newly formed state where they reside. So here, we might think of ethnic Albanians and Kosovo, for example. So, they might be non-citizens in the newly independent state where they live, but then also unable to travel elsewhere to claim documents or citizenship in another state. And then finally, the third cause that you mentioned in your question, discrimination, it really runs through all of these situations. But it also occurs where there isn't necessarily an active violent conflict or state succession. But there may be bureaucratic forms of violence and exclusion. So, political elites in a given state may wish to exclude certain ethnic minority groups, as we heard about in the intro regarding Muslims of Bengali origin and Assam state India, and also as my research and others investigates in relation to people of Haitian ancestry in the Dominican Republic, you know, a small group of us who are taking feminist or gender-based approaches to the study of statelessness. We're recognizing the need to really shift away from talking about it as a specialized niche or technical issue, and to think about it as another tool by which dominant groups maintain power over others. And this can be through patriarchy, through racialized citizenship controls through violence, or some toxic brew of all of these right So, when these exclusionary ways of wielding power, kind of meet with anti-immigrant rhetoric or populist nativism, you see that decision-makers can feel emboldened to really manufacture those so called unwanted others within their borders as migrants, even if they never really crossed an international border, as we're seeing again, amongst the peoples, you know, already mentioned in our conversation in Assam or of Haitian ancestry.
Maggie Perzyna
I'm curious how statelessness manifests in different regions of the world. Noora, in your book, 'Offshore Citizens', you embark on an in-depth case study of the United Arab Emirates, can you share some of the things that you learned?
Noora Lori
Yes, thank you for that. You know, let me just start off by giving some basic context to the UAE and the larger Gulf region. One of the distinctive factors of this region is that it is the third largest migrant receiving region in the world after North America and Western Europe, the Gulf has the largest amount of migrants. Many of them come from the Global South. It also has the highest concentrations of non-citizens to citizens in the world. So, in a place like the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar, we're looking at 10% of the population is citizen, 90% is non-citizen. And so, you know, the demographics of this region alone, they're kind of interesting. At the same time, I think you see, so there's some specificity, these are countries that are heavily dependent on 'quote on quote', temporary worker programs, especially after the oil boom of the 1970s. And major construction boom, across the Gulf region. One of the things that's kind of a big insight of my book is trying to understand migration enforcement or border control through time as opposed to space. So, we often think about borders as territorial borders. So, where they lie, they might be at the boundaries, they might be remote borders, like migrant interdiction at the high seas or consulate. So times when your ID gets checked outside of the territory of the state. Or we might think about interior borders, where your ID gets checked internally, like by landlords or hospitals, or schools. So, we're used to kind of thinking about borders through space. Equally important and less studied is the way that time gets used strategically to enforce borders. And so one of the things that the argument I tried to make in my book and really drawing upon a larger literature on time and migration, mobility is, you know, what matters is not how much time an individual has actually resided in the state. But how that state recognizes that time and converts it into rights. And so, the book is called, 'Offshore Citizens: Permanent Temporary Status in the Gulf', because technically, 90% of the population is on these temporary statuses. But in reality, they are not necessarily temporarily in the country. And in some cases, like for the Indian community, we might be looking at people who are in their fourth generation in the UAE, who've been there prior to the partition of India, but they're still on these temporary statuses. And so one of the things I look at in the book is the way that states miscount the time of quote-un-quote, 'undesirable migrants'. And that can be primarily labour migrants, or those seeking humanitarian protection. One of these inventions is to have these kinds of temporary statuses that get renewed. So, instead of being temporarily in the country, people are permanently deportable and having to kind of navigate this kind of limbo status over time. This doesn't only affect stateless populations, but I think thinking about time is a useful way of thinking about how statelessness emerges and how it becomes more salient over time. So, in the book, I look at not just communities who are on these temporary statuses and are, quote-un-quote, you know, 'temporary workers'. I also look at ethnic minorities in the UAE who have been there prior to the partition of the state, but never get recognized as citizens and think about what happens to them over time as their status doesn't change, but the state around them does. And so they become stateless over time. I think one way of making this a little bit concrete is to tell you a little bit about someone I call Abderrahman in the book that's not his real name. It's a pseudonym, but he was, in his narrative of his identity, he self-identifies as an ethnic Baloshi. Balochistan doesn't exist as a country. And the Baloshi community is large in Pakistan, Iran, Afghanistan, and in the Arab States of the Gulf. In Abderrahman's story, in his narrative of his ethnic lineage, his family moved to East Africa with the Omani empire, prior to the 19th century. Intermarried, they lived in East Africa for over the course of a century. And then, in 1972, Idi Amin expelled them from Uganda. And so, he was part of this group that gets expelled from Uganda in 1972 for effectively not being African enough to count as a Ugandan citizen. So, he along with members of his community, one group goes to Dubai, one group goes to Abu Dhabi. So, that's an example of statelessness because of persecution, because of your identity and not being counted, that also led to expulsion in this case. In the case of the UAE, he arrives and becomes stateless again over the course of 40 years, not because he is actively targeted, but because he's never fully recognized as a citizen. And that, if you have a document from a ruler's office, that's not you know, an official ID, but you can use it, especially in the 70s, and the 80s, to kind of communicate and negotiate to gain access to services, like health care, or education. But over time, as the state gets more consolidated as things get things get more regularized. If you don't have the right ID, you get locked out of goods and services over time. So, we especially see this with things like moves towards biometric passports or national ID cards. They seem like they're moments of this neutral mapping of the population, but they're actually often moments where states can decide to narrate who is a membership even more narrowly.
Maggie Perzyna
Allison, your PhD thesis looked up birth registration as a bordering practice. Can you explain what you found?
Allison Petrozziello
Sure, yeah, picking up on that theme of state decisions not to recognize people. So, I began seeing this just over a decade ago in 2013. And I was in the Dominican Republic, leading a study with the Caribbean Migrants Observatory (OBMICA), on the gender dimensions of statelessness, and that was amongst descendants of Haitian migrants in the Dominican Republic. So, generations of people like just like in the UAE case, who had been born in country, but didn't have the right kind of documents to prove a relationship to either state to Haiti or the Dominican Republic. And so, a lot of people writing about the case really assume that anti-Haitian racism is the main causal factor of statelessness there, and it is one factor, certainly. But because I was using the feminist theory of intersectionality, I was really trying to understand how different kinds of discrimination can intersect and be kind of operationalized through documentation practices, with the end result being statelessness. Right? So, basically understanding that it's not either or, like either racial discrimination or gender discrimination or ethnic but a combination of these. So, in that initial study, when we asked the other question of where's the sexism in this, we found that it was racialized women's reproductive capacity that had nationalists scrambling to access to restrict access to documentation and citizenship for the next generations and birth registration had emerged as a key site, where statelessness is produced and reproduced along the matrilineal line. And that's based on the mother's migration and documentation status alone. So, even when the father is a card-carrying Dominican citizen, they're not able to register the child and prove that relationship with the state. So, I started to understand then, how borders can be inscribed on racialized women's bodies, and enforced in everyday sites like the hospital or the civil registrar's office. And then that foundational document of the birth certificate is denied or delayed indefinitely in time, or there's a different kind of document issued that doesn't actually prove a relationship with the state like a foreigner’s birth certificate. So, that kind of imposition of borders or bordering as a process in everyday life. And it can be understood as a bordering practice, right? But it's kind of an umbrella term that can be used to identify the different elements of systems of governance, which can enact borders, so that can certainly be policy of law, but it can also be operational or administrative or programmatic. And I wanted to know where else in the world children of migrants and refugees were being excluded from birth registration and potentially made stateless as I was doing this big analysis, I was aware of these competing agendas in global development versus global migration governance. So, Noora already mentioned this trend towards e-governance and biometrics and rolling out national IDs. And that's really part of this global push that's underway toward inclusion and so-called, 'leaving no one behind' as part of the SDGs or sustainable development goals. And specifically, there's a target in there, 16.9, that aims to provide legal identity for all, including birth registration by 2030. So, basically, the UN system is making it rain, donors are making it rain, making funds available for states to roll out all these new technologies and so-called, 'get everyone in the picture'. But at the same time, as states that are desperate to control human mobility, are enacting these increasingly restrictive migration and border control measures at and beyond the physical border. So, I wanted to contrast, you know, those two efforts and see what was happening. So, what I do in the dissertation, and now it's a forthcoming book, called, 'Birth Registration is Bordering Practice', is I contrast those global efforts to achieve universal birth registration, on the one hand, with the everyday bordering practices on the other, which undermine the achievement of that goal. And what I argue is that the problem is not merely a technical problem of lack of registration, but rather that birth registration as an exercise of state power, is the mechanism of inclusion and exclusion. When birth registration is made of bordering practice, children who are born to pregnant people on the move and other multiply marginalized mothers who may not have crossed a border that can be made stateless for generations to come.
Maggie Perzyna
Are there unique challenges faced by stateless populations in specific areas, Noora?
Noora Lori
Yeah, thank you, I just want to say I completely agree with everything Allison was just talking about and there's, you definitely see, things that are specific to particular world regions. It might be the specific timeframe, for example, that you see state formation, the process of state formation, whether it's Imperial breakdown, decolonization or state formation, by revolution, you'll see different patterns of how people might become stateless, which groups become stateless. But you also see some very interesting similarities across world regions. And that's the first time I encountered Allison's work, I was just struck by how many similarities there are across these contexts. So, one of the reasons we see statelessness being widespread in the Middle East is the preponderance of Middle Eastern states that do not allow women to transfer citizenship to their children. And so, that means that many of the people who end up being stateless, become stateless because of this gender discrimination when it comes to citizenship. And so, you know, there are specificities, for example, the laws that, in general have gender discrimination when it comes to the acquisition of citizenship. And that is different across different parts of the globe. But then there's important similarities in the kinds of strategies that states undertake to manufacture foreign status in the same way that Allison was talking, about what's happening in the D.R. Claire Beaugrand has a beautiful book on statelessness in Kuwait, where she shows a very similar process of where people are effectively ascribed to a foreign state, even if they have no connections. So, for example, people born and raised in Kuwait, who, in order to regularize their status, or get ID documents that say they were from Iraq, or from a different state that eventually just locks them out of citizenship, not just Kuwaiti citizenship, but also Iraqi citizenship for which they have no connection and no ability to actually get that status. And so, some of the strategies of manufacturing foreignness, you definitely see across the globe, that you also see similarities in some of the timeframes. Like we know that, at least I know that in the Indian Ocean context, the period of decolonization between World War Two was in the 70s is really important in the Gulf, in particular, and in East Africa, between 1968 and 1971 is a critical juncture because that's when the British are deciding to pull out of this region and so there's kind of a scrambling to create these new nation states to formalize new citizenship and laws. And in that time period, you end up people being narrated as foreigners even if they were already in this new nation state and for anyone who is interested in some of the discussions we've been having about time, Elizabeth Cohen's, "The Political Value of Time", I think, really beautifully lays out some of the stakes. But one of the things that, you know, she looks at is why do we think of time as being important for acquiring membership rights. The idea is that it is uniformly experienced by all so it's a fair way of allocating rights and that over time, people build allegiance assimilation and should become members of the polity. And you know, Allison and I were both talking about these legal maneuvers or strategies that miscount the time of undesirable migrants by creating legal statuses that don't count their time towards permanent residency or citizenship rights, or on the flip side of the equation, this growing citizenship by investment and residency by investment industry where over 20% of all countries across the globe now have expedited legal pathways. This isn't black markets, these are legal pathways for high-net-worth individuals to exchange money for time. So, based on the size of the investment, they may decrease the residency requirements or entirely eliminate residency requirements in order to attain citizenship rights. And so, you can see these again as kind of state strategies of slowing down the time of undesirable migrants speeding up the time of people who are, quote-un-quote, 'desirable'.
Maggie Perzyna
Allison, what are the main misconceptions or myths surrounding statelessness?
Allison Petrozziello
Well, I'd say that the main misconception is that it is a technical problem which can be solved through technocratic solutions alone. So, we've been talking about how statelessness is created through an exercise of power, right. And so when you frame it only as a technical problem, assuming that oh, people are simply unaware, then the solution is oh, we can solve it through awareness campaigns, or people are just falling through the cracks between different States Citizenship laws, and so we can solve it through legal reform. But we've been discussing all along, you know, about this exercise of state power in exclusionary way. And so, when you depoliticize the issue, you're I think, doing a disservice to the cause, and that we have to be upfront about the political reasons why people are being excluded, in order to come up with more effective strategies for addressing it. And the other misconception that I'll highlight has to do with representations of stateless people, which tend to erase their agency, as if stateless people were just victims or nowhere people or ghosts or somehow powerless and forgotten, right. And this really flies in the face of what I've seen. I don't know about you, Nora. But over the years, I've met mothers who will not rest until they have a paper in hand proving their children's existence and nationality. And what I witnessed at the World Conference on Statelessness was really a powerful statement by stateless people themselves, who, like migrant and refugee advocates are demanding, 'nothing about us without us'. So, I think as, researchers and policy practitioners we're really called upon to listen and to follow their lead.
Noora Lori
Just to build on what Allison was saying, I think, two additional myths. One is that somehow the stateless are like this free-floating population roaming the earth and they don't have a state. It's not that people don't have a state, it's that the states that should recognize them, as citizens choose not to. And so even then, the example I gave earlier, about Abderrahman, there were at least three different states. Uganda could have given him citizenship, but he would have been very happy to stay where he was born and raised. The UAE could have given him citizenship, where he spent 40 years of his life. the Comoros Islands, which gave him a passport could have given him citizenship. But that passport came without a membership, right? So the issue is not that we have this free floating population. So, that's one myth. Another one is that people are stateless because they did something wrong, that there's something suspicious about how they enter the country about having a kind of subversive bloodline that doesn't match the imagined community. And we see this myth being exactly the strategy that states use in order to justify why they choose not to recognize particular people. And so, I know Allison agrees with me on the kind of the language that we use, but states often, you know, kind of calling people quote-un-quote, 'illegal'. We know that only actions can be illegal, human beings cannot be illegal, but that's a really important strategy that a lot of different states use, especially in these moments of ID regularization drives of, you know, we're giving you a chance to regularize your status because you came here irregularly or illegally. And that language makes people, even ordinary people, one of the things that I noticed when I was doing my fieldwork in the UAE is how much shame certain people had about the fact that they actually didn't have a secure citizenship status. Even among close friends, they may not reveal that. And so I would be in these conversations where people would say, of course, we shouldn't naturalize. If we naturalize all these people, there'd be no Emirati identity, there'd be no nationalism. And these are all people who just want to become citizens because they want access to say, the welfare state and not realizing that they are actually talking about individuals who are sitting at that exact same table with us. And so, there can be a kind of villainization of people who don't fit, because we want to come up with reasons why they don't fit and make it about their motivations or their actions or their behavior, as opposed to of really thinking about this as something that has, you know, people don't necessarily have control over it. Not to suggest, as I think Allison rightly pointed out that people don't have agency or ways of navigating these very difficult situations. But I think it's important not to assign blame.
Maggie Perzyna
Are there any successful initiatives or policies from certain countries that could serve as models for addressing statelessness globally? Allison?
Allison Petrozziello
Sure. Well, I already mentioned the World Conference on Statelessness. And there, there's an emerging global movement against statelessness. It was just formally launched there in Kuala Lumpur at the end of February this year [2024]. And there are also regional networks that are made up of civil society organizations, academics, and also, I think their preferred term for a lot of people is, 'citizenship affected people' with lived experience, not everybody is comfortable self-identifying as stateless. So, in the Americas, we have Red Ana, or the Americas network on nationality and statelessness. And so, these networks are important for a number of reasons, including what I mentioned earlier about foregrounding, and really amplifying the voices of stateless people who are on the front lines of this struggle, and who are the ones who will define what a solution looks like for them. For Palestinians, for example, their statelessness is part of a long-term struggle for self-determination and freedom from the violence and exclusion that they continue to experience. Right? And I'll just, you know, point to Maissaa Almustafa’s scholarship, on how the Palestinian case is sometimes, you know, treated as an exception to the international refugee protection regime. And this can also be seen in some sort of statelessness scholarship as well, right? As if it were an exceptional case when maybe it's the paradigmatic case, right? But in other contexts, as well, maybe many are saying, you know, a legal solution may not be enough or what is sought, because in some cases, even after formal citizenship is granted, many continue to experience discrimination, poverty and violence. So, there are others who are taking cultural approaches to voicing their claims to belonging and, and that's what we heard in the poetry by people in Assam, you know, in the beginning of the episode, people who are reclaiming the term Miya. And that being said, having papers proving your nationality does continue to be important. So, the other reason why these networks are really useful is because we can and do exchange ideas about how to resolve statelessness. So, I'll just flag two examples that I learned about through the stock-taking session on the Americas with Red Ana. And we got to learn from some amazing policy practitioners in Colombia and in Chile. And so, these are women who are actively devising initiatives to ensure that the children, mostly of Venezuelan migrants who had been displaced across the Americas and you know, for those who aren't familiar with it, the size of that displacement crisis, it really approaches that of Syria, you know, there are about right now, I think, 7.7 million people who have left the country since the start of the crisis in 2014, 2015. And so, for example, in neighboring Colombia for some time, the civil registrar was registering the children of Venezuelan migrants, but you're marking them and saying not valid for purposes of nationality. And so, later the country broke off diplomatic relations with Venezuela, there weren't even consulates available. And so, basically, the children were being made stateless. And this is on the continent of birthright citizenship, right? I mean, in most countries in the Americas, we do have jus soli entitlement to citizenship by virtue of being born on the territory. So, it's a presumed to be automatic. But again, you see these administrative practices that block access and produce as foreign children. So anyway, the initiative I heard about was one to restore it was called 'Primero la niñez', or 'childhood first' program. And they have reverted those practices and have granted Colombian nationality to some 30,000 children so far. And the other one I learned about is the nationality project in Chile. Both of these are supported by UNHCR. And they have been restoring nationality to those same children of Venezuelans who are born in Colombia, and issued that kind of foreigner birth certificate, but who later migrated onward to Chile. So, we see that these issues compound over time as and also over space as people continue to move. And so, these folks in Chile, could not travel back to Colombia to straighten out their children's papers. So, the project devised a way to do it remotely, through coordination of government institutions, and through active outreach to the population through these kind of documentation days. So, there are some proactive efforts to try to restore their right to a nationality.
Maggie Perzyna
Noora, looking to the future, any final thoughts to conclude?
Noora Lori
Yeah, I think that there are also examples of what not to do, the Comoros UAE passport deal as an example that on face value looks like you're solving the statelessness issue. And even some one, someone who worked for the private company that facilitated this deal kind of put it in these ways. He's like, well, what's the big deal like these people needed passports. And so, we facilitated that. And we got passports for them. And so, sometimes there's this misconception that you know, what's at stake is the document. But a document is useless unless it is tied to an authority that recognizes that document and ties it to access to rights. And so, insofar as we try to develop these kinds of ad hoc solutions that don't give people meaningful membership rights, we're only going to exacerbate stateless and this over time, one thing that I found surprising, and this is connected to the research I'm currently doing for my second book, which is actually on the speed side of the equation. So, you know, after looking at populations who are waiting for, citizenship for long periods of time, now this book is on the citizenship by investment and residency by investment programs. And so the book is called, 'Passport Power.' And over the summer, I had been going to these private firms that help people in the Gulf, buy passports from other parts of the world, Caribbean, some of the EU states, etc. I expected that the people who would be the main consumers would be rich, elite Gulf citizens, Saudi citizens and and others who want passports that give them access to say, retirement homes, summer homes in Europe or just greater visa free travel. Instead, what I've been finding is that these citizenship by investment programs are becoming an important coping strategy for people who find themselves in these situations of legal limbo over time if they have means. And so, based on talking with people who sell these programs on behalf of governments, some of the largest consumer groups include elite Palestinians, Syrians, Yemenis. And so, if you have the means, sometimes this can be a way of attaining citizenship rights that is more reliable and certainly faster than going through the international human rights framework. So, that I would think of as like mitigating, but not necessarily in a way that is equitable, and may be a form of kind of commodifying citizenship rights because it makes your access to rights not inalienable, but based on whether you have enough means in order to kind of buy yourself a recognized legal status.
Maggie Perzyna
Allison?
Allison Petrozziello
What is clear is that momentum is building, we do have capacity to build systems and practices that do recognize the humanity before us. And I'll just conclude by saying I think it's on the rest of us who do enjoy citizenship and have papers to prove it and can exercise our political rights to vote in political leaders who are capable of inclusion and who are committed to upholding our human rights to an identity and a nationality.
Maggie Perzyna
Thanks to Professor Noora Lori and Dr. Allison Petrozziello for joining me today and thank you for listening. This is a CERC Migration podcast produced in collaboration with Lead Podcasting. If you enjoyed the episode, subscribe to Borders & Belonging on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. For more information on the issues surrounding statelessness, please visit the show notes. I'm Maggie Perzyna. Thanks for listening!