2021
Statelessness & Citizenship Review
3(2)
stateless people or their collective identities placed in focus. 40 Some scholars
question the liberal and individualist statelessness perspective and highlight the
potential of a perspective based on collective experience, identity and belonging. 41
As such, the state also relates to issues of identity, nation, nationalism and ideas
of a homeland. 42 Therefore, statelessness is imbricated with questions evolving
around identity and belonging. 43
Recently, research has acknowledged potential social aspects of statelessness. 44
Acquisition of (individual) citizenship in some states might not be the solution.
Rather, statelessness may be a collective experience requiring political solutions.
The term ‘social statelessness’ has been used to capture this predicament and the
‘complex interactions between statelessness, diaspora and nationalism’. 45
Statelessness (as for the Palestinians) may be connected to the absence of a state
and not merely the absence of citizenship. 46
Resistance to this protracted condition of oblivion include a repertoire of
individual as well as collective actions, varying from using existing legal
recourses, mobilising in protest actions or acts that include self-harm, such as
hunger strikes or lip-sewing, 47 representing a potential self-sacrifice and a
‘weaponization of life’. 48 Banu Bargu argues that destruction of the body, and
ultimately death, represents ‘counterconduct to the administration of life’
performed by the migration regime. 49 If migration politics and the
governmentality of mobility implicate ‘slow violence’, 50 then controlling one’s
body, life and death is to reverse power relations and defy the disciplining
implications of the regime. Acts of resistance imply a refusal of passivisation and
a struggle ‘to make life possible in a place that did not want them’. 51 Ilana Feldman
stated that ‘refusal … is a form of anticipation’ and involves an idea about futuremaking, of creating ‘liveable lives’. 52
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52
See Victoria Redclift, Statelessness and Citizenship: Camps and the Creation of Political
Space (Routledge 2013); Barzoo Eliassi, ‘Statelessness in a World of Nation-States: The
Cases of Kurdish Diasporas in Sweden and the UK’ (2016) 42(9) Journal of Ethnic and
Migration Studies 1403.
See eg, Tas (n 31); Gabiam (n 15); Bloom (n 15).
Gabiam (n 15) 487.
See Elena Fiddian-Quasmiyeh, ‘Invisible Refugees and/or Overlapping Refugeedom?
Protecting Sahrawis and Palestinians Displaced by the 2011 Libyan Uprising’ (2012) 24(2)
International Journal of Refugee Law 26.
See eg, Tas (n 31); Gabiam (n 15); Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘On the Threshold of
Statelessness: Palestinian Narratives of loss and erasure’. Ethnic and Racial Studies (2016)
39(2).
Tas (n 31) 43.
Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh, ‘On the Threshold of Statelessness: Palestinian Narratives of loss
and erasure’ (2016) 39(2) Ethnic and Racial Studies 301, 309.
See JoAnn McGregor, ‘Contestations and Consequences of Deportability: Hunger Strikes and
the Political Agency of Non-Citizens’ (2011) 15(1) Citizenship Studies 597; Griffiths,
‘Anonymous Aliens?’ (n 22) 723; Deirdre Conlon, ‘Hungering for Freedom: Asylum Seekers’
Hunger Strikes — Rethinking Resistance as Counter-Conduct’ in Nick Gill and Dominique
Moran, Carceral Spaces: Mobility and Agency in Imprisonment and Migrant Detention
(Routledge 2013) 130, 133; Stierl (n 2) 35.
Banu Bargu, Starve and Immolate (Columbia University Press 2014) 1, 65.
ibid 85.
Nixon (n 18).
Stierl (n 2) xi.
Feldman (n 13) 222.
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