8 Daiva Stasiulis the 1961 UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness.10 Third, the fact that in 2014, the UNHCR embarked on a 10-year global campaign to end statelessness offers a unique contemporary moment to examine and address statelessness in Canada. What does it mean to be stateless in a country that has an international reputation for “statefullness,” characterized by a relatively democratic and socially inclusive citizenship regime? A stateful country accords some rights to stateless persons; but with far less legal obligation to the denationalized, these are not rights but discretionary privileges provided by a “generous” state. For those stripped of nationality, if additionally (as likely) deemed to be “inadmissible to Canada” for reasons such as serious criminality, treason, or terrorism, the stateless are prone to indefinite detention or banishment. Statelessness in Canada, as elsewhere, becomes a form of “political and civil death,” the total destruction of the individual’s status in organized society (Lavi, 2011, p. 800, citing Trop v Dulles). To be a stateless person is to face endless legal and practical erasure, suspicion, rejection and punishment on a daily basis. This includes the inability to prove one’s identity, register one’s marriage or birth of one’s children, move freely, and access health care, education, employment and other social services. Not having citizenship or permanent residence leaves stateless persons as ineligible to leave the country and robs them of the right to return, even to a country where they may have resided their entire lives. One who has had their citizenship extinguished and lacks the protection of any sovereign conforms to Giorgio Agamben’s concept of homo sacer: having been stripped bare of citizenship, the “accursed man” (or “sacred man,” a figure in Roman law) exists in a wasteland between exile and belonging, between life and death. Deprived of rights, homines sacri such as the stateless experience only “bare life” (Agamben, 1995). Agamben’s “states of exception,” such as promulgated by the global war on terrorism have produced homines sacri through laws to curtail, contain and monitor the state’s own citizens through illiberal and non-democratic means. Citizenship reforms in Canada, the United States, Australia and several European countries during the past decade have broadened grounds and paths for revocation and extinguishment of citizenship,11 opening up what Linda Kerber (2007, p. 24) calls new categories of “instability and potential statelessness.” Citizenship, long thought of as an “inalienable right,” particularly for those born with this status, is now increasingly recast as conditional upon conduct through the emergence of new “regimes of 10 As of May 8, 2016, 65 state parties had ratified or acceded to the Convention (United Nations, 2016). Importantly, Canada has yet to ratify the 1954 Convention, which would require Canada to actually put in place some kind of specific protections for stateless people. Principally, this could include a statelessness determination procedure separate from the refugee status determination process (Brouwer, 2012). 11 As of 2014, 22 countries in Europe had passed laws permitting denaturalization for terrorism or other behavior contrary to the national interest (Forcese, 2014). Studies in Social Justice, Volume 11, Issue 1, 1-26, 2017