116 T. MCGEE have been under way to establish a taskforce for the new Global Alliance to End Statelessness (UNHCR, 2022). The Global Alliance is framed as, a new initiative that by 2030 seeks to accelerate solutions to statelessness through a collective multistakeholder approach, which centers and respects the experience of those who are stateless and formerly stateless … [and] to build on the concrete gains and momentum generated by the #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness by 2024 and serve as a platform to increase collective advocacy efforts, catalyze political commitments to address the problem, and accelerate the implementation of concrete solutions to statelessness. (UNHCR, 2022) This new initiative responds to a key recommendation by evaluators of UNHCR’s statelessness work: that the agency, “should invest in shifting from fragmented bilateral partnerships toward building a lasting multistakeholder coalition to end statelessness, with shared ownership and responsibilities, that is replicable at regional and national levels, to carry the statelessness agenda forward after 2024” (UNHCR, 2021, p. 55). At this critical moment in UNHCR’s reinvention of its statelessness work, it is therefore timely to question the logic of the venture and the theory of change underpinning the agency’s work in this area. Although most evaluations of IBelong have focused on internal institutional factors, such as staffing and resourcing of statelessness programming (e.g., Resonance Frontier Market Solutions, 2021, p. 4), little attention has been given to questioning the very basis of the idea of ending statelessness by a fixed—arguably, implausibly soon—deadline. Eradication framing: IBelong as transitional campaign for change This section contextualizes UNHCR’s IBelong campaign to End Statelessness by 2024 alongside other ambitious transnational initiatives seeking to end or eradicate a specifically identified global welfare issue or problem. Drawing on the examples of the 2005 Make Poverty History (MPH) campaign and the ongoing UN target to End AIDS by 2030, I review the unique implications when framing movements for change through an aspirational eradication paradigm. Interweaving critical lessons from these two initiatives, I consider the operational and ethical significance for the IBelong campaign (and its successor initiative). First, it should be noted that such discursive framing is situated within the broader paradigm of a progressive norm-setting agenda that has dominated the international development field since the turn of the twenty-first century. Starting in 2000, all UN member states agreed to launch the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) as a set of eight aspirational objectives to decisively address global human development problems within a decade and a half. As a blueprint for progress, implementation was to be assessed against 21 specific and measurable targets. Following the expiration of the MDGs in 2015, with some significant inroads but notably uneven progress in achieving the targets (United Nations, 2015), their trajectory was reworked and extended through the establishment of a follow-up initiative for another 15-year period: the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), which set 17 new objectives against 169 associated targets to be achieved by 2030. In fact, the IBelong campaign should be understood as embedded within this wider trajectory of global efforts to eradicate world ills, a phenomenon exemplified by the MDGs and SDGs. Indeed, it is notable that the campaign emerged during the very year in which debates were culminating about the closure of the MDGs, and the stage was being set for the launch of the SDGs as their successor project. Although the development goals are not referenced explicitly in the IBelong campaign’s founding documents, the campaign was created in the transition period between the two agendas (MDGs and SDGs). Therefore, it is logically plausible that the general climate of intense reflection concentrated on stock-taking and effectiveness (of the MDGs) and on elaboration of a new framework (ultimately that of the SDGs) preoccupying the international community at the time (Carin, 2013; Fehling et al., 2013; Fukuda-Parr et al., 2013, Fukuda-Parr et al., 2014; Kwon & Kim, 2014; Lomazzi et al., 2014; Saner Yiu & Saner, 2014; Sen & Mukherjee, 2014) had—at least indirect—influence on the thinking that led to the shaping of the IBelong campaign.