112 T. MCGEE in the discipline of statelessness work due to the prolonged legal dominance (Critical Statelessness Studies Project, 2020). One such assumption addressed here is the idea that efforts focused on ending statelessness are always unproblematic and deserve to be the ultimate focus of all work within the statelessness sector. Related thinking led Brennan and myself to establish the critical statelessness studies (CSS) project as “a platform for (emerging) statelessness scholars engaged with critical theory or critical methods” (Brennan & McGee, 2020). Calling for like-minded peers to join in “foster[ing] dialogue that challenges prevalent thinking on the nature and experience of statelessness” (Brennan & McGee, 2020), the resultant outputs (more than 40 entries to date) have generated much reflection on what critical approaches to statelessness might look like. What is clear is that there is a need, drawing on critical epistemology (Farias et al., 2016), to consider questions around issue framing, as well as the agency and representation of stateless people. For instance, although—for those affected by it—statelessness is almost always an undesirable status, it may equally be considered through bell hook’s concept of marginality as a site of resistance: That it is, in her words, “much more than a site of deprivation … it is also the site of radical possibility, a space of resistance. … It offers the possibility of radical perspectives from which to see and create, to imagine alternative, new worlds” (hooks, 1989, p. 20). Disturbed by the way stateless people have traditionally been represented almost exclusively through the prism of deprivation and misery, I take inspiration from the work of Haqqi Bahram (2021) on developing a “stateless standpoint epistemology” in order to understand power dynamics involved in studying statelessness, and ultimately seeking to counter citizenist and statist perspectives. Such concerns have informed both my approach to writing about the topic and the way in which I have sought to engage with those affected by the issue. Beyond the essential legal characterization of a stateless person as somebody “not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law” (Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, 1954, Art. 1), I consider the varied contextual specificities around statelessness. I do so by applying to stateless individuals the spirit of anthropologist Liisa Malkki’s (1995a) declaration that “the term refugee has analytical usefulness not as a label for a special, generalizable ‘kind’ or ‘type’ of person or situation, but only as a broad legal or descriptive rubric that includes within it a world of different socioeconomic statuses, personal histories, and psychological or spiritual situations” (p. 496). The argument that there is no universal, generalizable condition or shared group characteristic beyond the very definitional status of the term stateless person (as enshrined in international law) may, in fact, apply to stateless people even more aptly than it does to refugees. This is partly because the refugee definition stipulates certain necessary experiences (first, persecution on one of the five convention grounds and, second, the crossing of an international border) whereas the definition of a stateless person simply rests on a negative characteristic (i.e., not being a national of any state). We know nothing of the experience of a stateless person beyond what he or she is not. Furthermore, the experiences of stateless people may be more diverse still because of the less comprehensive reach of the global international protection regime (and its regulatory practices) for stateless individuals compared to that for refugees. Far fewer countries around the world are signatories to the 1954 and 1961 Statelessness Conventions than to the 1951 Refugee Convention,1 and only a minority of those states that have ratified the 1954 Convention have established a statelessness determination procedure to identify stateless persons. Programmatic budgets for refugee work far exceed those dedicated for interventions on statelessness. Moreover, in many countries the UN agency responsible for both groups of people (UNHCR) maintains operational statistics for refugees while holding no accurate figures for stateless persons (UNHCR, 2020). These are all indicators that stateless individuals are likely living at a greater distance from the homogenizing structures and practices of the international system mandated to be “concerned” with their situation. For example, a recent evaluation of the United Nations’ statelessness work recognizes that,