4 Daiva Stasiulis citizenship and briefly address the role of contestation, especially by Budlakoti himself, in resisting legal and social erasure. Actor-Network Theory (ANT) and the Sociology of Statelessness Although scholarship on citizenship deprivation and statelessness in the Canadian context is fairly nascent, there has recently been a flurry of debate, engaged in primarily by legal scholars, political theorists and ethicists on the legal and normative (i.e., human rights) aspects of statelessness in Canada, the U.S., Australia and the European community (Edwards & van Waas, 2014). An under-explored dimension of the literature is sociological analysis of the social relations, mechanisms, agency of multiple actors, documents, accidents (Nyers, 2009), bureaucratic errors, etc., that produce statelessness for certain subjects and populations, and of the lived experience and identities of stateless individuals and communities. Ethnographic and other qualitative methodologies have been illuminating of citizenship as not exclusively a juridical relationship between individuals and states involving particular statutory rights and obligations, but as importantly a negotiated and dynamic relationship within a network of institutions and social interactions spanning the state and civil society (Stasiulis, 2013; Stasiulis & Bakan, 2005). Similarly, Sigona (2016, p. 267) has argued that a sociological understanding of statelessness would place “the investigation of the everyday, concrete manifestations at its core, while being attentive also to the process of institutionalization of ‘statelessness’… [as] a technology of power operating across different scales and in different locales.” Sociological analysis would enrich our appreciation of the social relations of power that underlie the making and unmaking of citizenship and of the everyday experience of statelessness. It is essential for producing socio-legal comprehension of statelessness, illuminating how the social and legal realms interact and intertwine to produce this most abject of legal and social identities. Citizenship is usually regarded as far more than a mere legal bond between state and individual, albeit that legal status is fundamental to the enjoyment often of even basic human rights. 4 It is also (in most cases) the lived experience of that legal bond or what the International Court of Justice (ICJ) in the 1955 Nottebohm case referred to as the “genuine link” basis for citizenship defined in terms of “the social fact of attachment, a genuine connection of existence, interests and sentiments, together with the existence of reciprocal rights and duties.”5 The genuine link (also called the “real and 4 Even in the early U.S. and French declarations of rights, there was a recognition that “natural rights” or what are now commonly referred to as “universal human rights” granted to all individuals at birth, “could only be recognized and enforced in a practical way through membership in a State” (David Weissbrodt, quoted in Howard-Hassmann, 2015, p.1). 5 Nottebohm (Liech. V. Guat.), 1955 ICJ 4, 23. Nottebohm was a man who was born in Germany, had German citizenship, but lived for 34 years in Guatemala, where he never became a citizen. Studies in Social Justice, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-26, 2017