2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(1) that place statelessness at the centre of exploration. We hope that the Review will provide a lasting opportunity for this collaborative and multi-disciplinary effort. Phillip Cole and Lindsey Kingston’s contributions to the Symposium in this issue help to elucidate the second reason for the timeliness of the Review’s inauguration. As more academic work is done and as more scholars are drawn into this issue, it is becoming evident in ever wider circles that we must ‘take statelessness seriously’, as Cole describes, because the study of statelessness may lead to new insights that have ‘radical implications’ for our understanding of the world (in Cole’s case, political theory). We hope that the Review will help to nurture and encourage such exploration by filling the gap that has until now existed for a specific journal in which the major questions prompted by statelessness are asked — and answers discussed. As Kingston is right to emphasise, ‘statelessness is complicated [and] cannot be neatly categorised within any academic discipline or assigned any one-size-fits all “solution”’, which means that we must capitalise on and protect the ‘political and academic space to dig deeper… [for] this, my friends and colleagues, is where things get interesting’. As editors-in-chief of the Review, we look forward to participating in the shaping of this field going forward and witnessing its further progress in the years to come. Contemporary state practice concerning deprivation of citizenship in response to the so-called ‘foreign fighter’ phenomenon, the forced deportation of the Rohingya in August 2017 and questions around the status of the children born to refugees fleeing Syria or to former members of ISIS, are just some examples of contemporary challenges that academia must engage with. This is a third key motivation for establishing a journal: to monitor, research, understand, explain, critique and contribute towards informing appropriate responses to situations of statelessness around the world. The Review is a co-creation of ISI and the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness, and as such is exemplary of the exciting collaborations that are being forged between different actors around these issues. Indeed, it is important to recognise that the impressive pace at which academic involvement in statelessness has developed over the last decade is matched — or was perhaps prompted — by a similarly striking evolution of global engagement. From the early 2000s when United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (the agency mandated by the General Assembly to lead United Nations efforts to tackle statelessness) had only a single staff member in a full-time statelessness post, to the commemoration this year of what is already the half-way mark of the ambitious Global Action Plan to End Statelessness. From a time when ratification of the two UN statelessness treaties was so low as to suggest that they were obsolete instruments, to an era of renaissance for these conventions and of the adoption of new legal and political commitments to work together to address statelessness. From a period in which civil society interest in statelessness was limited to a few isolated individuals who described their early exploits in this area as a ‘lonely’ experience, to an age in which statelessness and the promotion of the 2