Statelessness As A Lack Of Functioning Citizenship 129 From this perspective, the state has a duty to uphold the rights of its citizens; the ideal of citizenship requires equal membership in a rights-protective community. This view has shaped modern understandings of nationality and belonging, yet the ideal of fully functioning citizenship is rarely achieved. Cohen warns against idealizing citizenship and argues that citizenship itself is a gradient category. She writes that norm-driven definitions of citizenship often don’t reflect reality, and that many individuals fit on a spectrum somewhere between full and non-citizenship; they are semi-citizens. ‘Extrapolating what citizenship is from a notion of what citizenship ought to be has the tendency to produce misleading and sometimes troublesome conclusions,’ she writes.4 The political membership of migrants, children, and the disabled all illustrate situations of semi-citizenship, when an individual may hold legal nationality but cannot access their full range of rights for a variety of reasons. This is closely related to Iris Marion Young’s concept of ‘differentiated citizenship,’ which uncovers injustices within the structure of state society and highlights that not all of those considered full citizens are treated as such.5 If we refer back to Marshall’s premise that citizenship requires full equality, this spectrum of semi-citizenship quickly raises questions about our understanding of legal nationality and its impact on rights protection. At the same time, the forces of globalization – including the rise of the international human rights regime – have prompted some to (mistakenly) devalue the importance of political membership. Despite the prevalence of international human rights law, which guarantees rights to all persons regardless of nationality, a number of standards are nevertheless intricately linked to state citizenship. The right to participate in government, freedom of movement, and an array of economic rights all require government action (such as the acknowledgement of votes, the issuance of passports, and the granting of legal work status). These so-called ‘universal’ rights require citizenship (or, at the very least, some sort of residency status) to be realized.6 These norms ‘call into question the inclusiveness of the term “human rights”,’ suggesting that denationalization is 4 Elizabeth F. Cohen, Semi-Citizenship in Democratic Politics (CUP 2009) 18-19. 5 Iris Marion Young, Justice and the Politics of Difference (Princeton 1990). 6 It should be noted that other human rights that require positive obligations by the state – including education, health, housing, and marriage – are often available to those without citizenship or legal residency. Much depends on the state in question. Undocumented migrants can access public education in the United States, for example, while research suggests that stateless children are often unable to gain a basic education in countries such as Bangladesh and Senegal. See: M. Lynch, ‘Futures Denied: Statelessness Among Infants, Children, and Youth’ (2008) <http://www.refugeesinternational.org/sites/default/files/ Stateless_Children_FINAL.pdf> accessed 19 October 2013. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 127-135