Statelessness As A Lack Of Functioning Citizenship 133 nationality for human rights protection, and advocates contend that steps toward citizenship – including universal birth registration and the naturalization of marginalized minority populations – will prevent the negative impacts of de jure statelessness. Although legal nationality is certainly an important factor for protecting human rights in our current world system, this narrow focus leads to other rights implications. First, the reality is that legal status alone will not cure the social ills affecting the world’s de jure stateless populations. An emphasis on legal nationality fails to acknowledge the issue of functioning citizenship, which cannot be guaranteed by legal nationality alone. This is highlighted by de facto statelessness, which limits human rights protections for those who possess legal nationality. Shortcomings in the ways we currently approach membership uncover a worldwide ‘citizenship gap,’ or a ‘lack of political mechanisms to ensure individual membership, power holders’ accountability, and respect for human rights in a globalizing world system.’19 To address this gap and the vulnerabilities created by lack of functioning citizenship, new standards of membership must be considered. Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir argue that existing resources from the citizenship tradition must be used to address protection gaps. New venues and forms of participation must be constructed to broaden human rights accountability, while ‘people out of place’ (such as the de jure and de facto stateless) require space in existing institutions and leverage within state structures. The relationship between formal state citizenship and new forms of global community must also be developed, thereby closing the divide between legal nationality and somewhat utopian notions of ‘global citizenship’ or ‘cosmopolitan citizenship.’20 Second, reliance on legal nationality excludes groups who do not conform to the state model. It forces many minority groups into state-sponsored identity categories, requiring peoples who do not identify with states (such as indigenous nations of the Iroquois Confederacy, or Haudenosaunee, in North America) to accept state citizenship in order to protect their human rights. Relatedly, states have an interest in identifying and regulating de jure stateless populations within their borders. In his analysis of Upland Southeast Asia, for instance, James C. Scott argues that the governance of hill tribes and the international community’s reliance on legal nationality constitutes a form of 19 20 Alison Brysk, ‘Conclusion: From Rights to Realities’ in Alison Brysk (ed), Globalization and Human Rights (University of California Press 2002) 242-256; 246. Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir, ‘Conclusion: Globalizing Citizenship?’ in Alison Brysk and Gershon Shafir (eds), People Out of Place: Globalization, Human Rights, and the Citizenship Gap (Routledge 2004) 209-215; 210, 213. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 127-135