2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(2) and the redress of land ownership and rights. 9 Australia’s objections were to the veto power of indigenous people (coming from informed consent) as it would allegedly undermine the processes of a democratically elected government in the country. 10 Similarly, New Zealand initially opposed UNDRIP. The New Zealand representative expressed its opposition in the following way: In terms of land and resources, New Zealand commented that the declaration’s provisions simply cannot be practically implemented, and it would produce inequality between Maori and other citizens. … Concerning the principle of informed consent as an alleged ‘right of veto’ by Indigenous citizens over a democratic legislature, New Zealand insisted that Maori are actually well represented in government institutions, including parliament, and that the declaration text would create ‘different classes of citizens, where indigenous people have a right of veto that other groups of individuals do not have’. 11 While all four countries that initially opposed UNDRIP later on supported it, Sheryl Lightfoot commented that their support was done as a ‘selective endorsement’, only backing the Declaration so long as it would not interfere with the current legislative orders of the respective countries. 12 Paraphrasing loosely literary theorist Roland Barthes and his now classical work S/Z, 13 the above examples illustrate my reception process as a reader of Shaw’s profound book. Contemplating Barthes’ theory made me think that in scholarly writing we could find three types of books. The first type of academic book leaves the reader unimpressed after they have finished reading it and does not affect their own thinking. The second type of book affects the reader after they were done reading it: this type of book makes the reader think what did they learned from the material just read. Yet, the best kind of scholarly books are, in my view, the ones that are like a journey for the reader. Such books challenge the reader at every step to be in dialogue with the material just read. The two examples I have presented in the paragraphs above are excerpts from the dialogue I had with the book The People in Question while reading it. Shaw’s book masterfully points to ambivalences around her new concept of constitutional citizenship. As she shows with her vast empirical analysis, it is not often that constitutions explain what citizenship means in each individual country, as if governments avoid fully defining the meaning of such a monumental and common state building block in a binding manner. 14 Yet perhaps paradoxically, at the same time, what is defined in constitutions gives a certain direction to what it means to be a citizen in any certain state: Together the chapters show that even though detailed regulation of citizenship within constitutions is rare, leaving key matters to be decided by legislatures, these texts none the less proved the discursive framework within which the ethics and often the practices of citizenship are debated at the national level. 15 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 UNDRIP (n 8) arts 10, 11. Sheryl R Lightfoot, ‘Selective Endorsement without Intent to Implement: Indigenous Rights and the Anglosphere’ (2012) 16(1) The International Journal of Human Rights 107. ibid 109−10. ibid. Rolandes Barthes, S/Z (Editions du Seuil 1970). Shaw (n 1) 8. ibid. 386