geographical spaces within a country, eking out an existence on its fringes. They can be denied access to all government services and benefits of the country in which they were born. They can, in essence, be denied the ability to be a self-determining agent.2 The institution of citizenship is so vital to the way in which the world is ordered, and the way in which States manage people, no internationally recognized right to be voluntarily stateless exists. Even the human rights treaties that include the human right to a nationality are typically clear that a person cannot be deprived of citizenship unless she or he has another nationality first. In fact, citizenship is so important to our ability to be in the world that Eleanor Roosevelt, one of the drafters of the UDHR, stated that she considered the human right to a nationality to be one of three rights that were of “vital importance” (the other two being the right to freedom of conscience/religion and the right to take part in the government of her or his country without discrimination) (Roosevelt 1948). Despite the problems associated with statelessness, however, there are those who give up their citizenship and choose to become voluntarily stateless. As Jocelyn Kane explains in her piece, “Voluntary Statelessness: Reflections on Implications for International Relations and Political Theory,” whether as an act of resistance against State policies they did not like, or because they were autonomous polities before being colonized by “the State,” individuals give up or reject citizenship. Kane examines the implications of voluntarily statelessness on our understanding of sovereignty, global governance, membership and the social contract, demonstrating how the existence of voluntarily stateless persons and groups challenges some of our key precepts of how the world is understood. Moving from the realm of political theory to international law, Tanya Faye Herring’s piece on “Statelessness and the struggle to close the gap in human rights through legal empowerment,” investigates how we can use existing treaties, as well as domestic legal tools, to address statelessness. Moving beyond the law, her piece also shows us how statelessness and indigenity intersect in the Southeast Asian context. This Symposium thus includes a diversity of perspectives on statelessness, written both by practitioners and academics hailing from various countries. Although they come from different disciplinary and regional contexts, and do not necessarily approach statelessness in the same manner, they all share an important commonality— membership in the International Network of Statelessness Scholars (INOSS). 3 They are thus part of the budding community of individuals who are working to address statelessness in its various facets and who make up the larger global effort to end statelessness. In 2014, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), the body mandated with the identification and protection of stateless people, and the reduc- 2 For an in-depth argument on the relationship between citizenship and self-determination as it relates to statelessness, see Belton (2017). 3 For further information on INOSS, or to become a member, please visit: http://www.institutesi.org/forum/academic.php. http://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 10