Symposium “Seeing Statelessness: at the interstices of sovereignty, self-determination and discrimination” Introduction Symposium Coordinator & Introductory Essay Author, Kristy A. Belton, Director of Professional Development, International Studies Association & Senior Programme Officer, Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion The world recently welcomed the rescue of the Wild Boars football team, a group of 12 youths and their coach, who had been stuck for over two weeks in an area of Sam Luang cave in Thailand, which had become flooded during a monsoon downpour. Among those children was Abdul Sam-on, a 14-year old boy who has been heralded as a hero for acting as an interpreter during the rescue. While the world got to know Sam-on and the rest of his team during these past few weeks, he was invisible to the eyes of the State. Sam-on, along with two of his teammates and his coach, is stateless. No country recognizes and claims them as its citizens. While most are familiar with the stateless Rohingya of Burma—where more than 600,000 Rohingya have fled to Bangladesh and other neighboring countries because of persecution in Burma since August 2017—fewer are familiar with the other stateless groups in the region. Sam-on and the other stateless members of his soccer team are part of tribal groups, or ethnic minorities, who are not counted among the citizens of the States in the region (whether Thailand, Burma or Laos). They therefore present another face of statelessness,1 illustrating the complexities that arise around who is allowed to formally belong to the body politic (the “State”) in a region where ethnic diversity is immense and where peoples have moved back and forth across State borders for centuries. The case of Sam-on and his stateless teammates brings to the fore the difficulties in fulfilling each person’s human right to a nationality. Unlike many of the other human rights that we find articulated in the United Nations’ (UN) Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) and in UN human rights treaties, the human right to a nationality is not currently one that can be fulfilled by any other actor other than the State (through its authorized representative). International law is clear that it is up to each State to determine who should formally belong via citizenship, and States—while not allowed to “arbitrarily” deprive people of citizenship—are allowed to do so on a host of grounds 1 Nearly half a million people are registered as stateless within Thailand alone, but this figure is likely “un- derstated” because many individuals have not undergone the statelessness registration process (Wongcha-um and Pearson 2018). http://community.apsanet.org/migrationcitizenship/home 8