Statelessness

About: Statelessness is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 781 publications have been published within this topic receiving 6856 citations. The topic is also known as: stateless.

The Human Rights of Stateless Persons

Abstract: By exploring statelessness through legal, theoretical, and practical lenses, this article presents a broad examination of the human rights of stateless persons. The article delineates the rights of stateless persons as enunciated in various human rights instruments; presents the mechanisms of, and paths to, statelessness; illustrates the practical struggles of stateless persons by highlighting the plights of various stateless populations; examines how the problem of statelessness is being addressed; and considers the complex political and regional forces affecting policies towards stateless persons. The article concludes with recommendations regarding remedies and solutions for statelessness.

On the threshold of statelessness: Palestinian narratives of loss and erasure

Abstract: This article examines how Palestinians in Europe negotiate, mobilise, and/or resist, and ultimately problematise, notions of statelessness as a concept and as a marker of identity. Centralising Palestinians’ conceptualisations in this manner – including accounts which directly challenge academics’ and policy-makers’ definitions of the problem of, and solution to, statelessness – is particularly important given that statelessness emerges as both a condition and a label that erase the ability to speak, and be heard. The article starts by examining perceptions of statelessness as a marker of rightlessess, home(land)lessness and voicelessness. It then explores statelessness through the paradigm of the ‘threshold’, reflecting both on interviewees’ ambiguity towards this label, status, and condition, and the extent to which even Palestinians who hold citizenship remain ‘on the threshold of statelessness’. It concludes by reflecting on interviewees’ rejection of a label that is imposed upon them ‘from a ...

Citizens and Refugees: Constructing and Negotiating Tibetan Identities in Exile

Abstract: At the heart of the relationship between identity and the state is the construction of a binary between the citizen resident, in a bounded national community, and its archetypal “other,” the refugee. The case studied here fundamentally disrupts this dualism and the conventional mapping of citizen and refugee onto concepts of statehood and statelessness. With their own government structure operating within the state of India—albeit without legal recognition—exile Tibetans are simultaneously “Tibetan citizens” in the eyes of the Tibetan Government-in-Exile, “refugees” in the eyes of many within the international community, and “foreign guests” in the eyes of the Indian state. Based on ethnographic research on exiled Tibetan political institutions and practices, this article charts the contradictory relationship between Tibetans in India and each of the two “governments” that identify, label, and document them. It does so by exploring both the legal discourses and bureaucratic administrations through which t...

Abjects or agents? Camps, contests and the creation of ‘political space’

Abstract: The ‘Urdu-speaking population’ in Bangladesh, displaced by the Partition in 1947 and made ‘stateless’ by the Liberation War of 1971, exemplifies some of the key problems facing uprooted populations. Exploring differences of ‘camp’ and ‘non-camp’ based displacement, this article represents a critical evaluation of the way ‘political space’ is contested at the local level and what this reveals about the nature and boundaries of citizenship. Semi-structured and narrative interviews conducted among ‘camp’ and ‘non-camp’ based ‘Urdu-speakers’ found that citizenship status has been profoundly affected by the spatial dynamics of settlement. However, it also revealed the ways in which ‘formal’ status is subverted – the moments of negotiation in which claims to political being are made. In asking how and when a ‘stateless’ population is able to ‘access’ citizenship, through which processes and by which means, it reveals the tension, ambiguity and conceptual limitations of ‘statelessness’ and citizenship, unearthin...