6. Conclusions Statelessness is a serious but largely invisible problem in West Africa. This invisibility is also true in other regions of the world, but the scale of the problem is particularly obscured in countries where many people are undocumented even if their nationality and legal status is not in doubt; where weaknesses in administrative systems and pervasive corruption mean that documents are in any event given a low evidential value; where conflicts have meant that individuals have lost documents and records have been destroyed; and where attachments to contemporary states may (partly as a result) be less strong than attachments to ethnic group, religious communities or other affiliations. It is difficult (anywhere) to identify obvious populations of “stateless people”: the undocumented tend to want to remain out of the limelight; and often it is believed that they are not in fact stateless, just “from somewhere else”. There is thus a common perception that statelessness is not really an issue, since “If you are really Senegalese/Nigerian/Guinean/Liberian…” documents are available; and if you are not “really” from that country, there is one that you can return to in order to obtain (proof of) its nationality. But who is “really” from the country may be a matter of interpretation: as became apparent in Côte d’Ivoire when the state started to apply stricter rules that excluded many who had always thought themselves Ivorian; and as the case of Côte d’Ivoire also showed, systematic policies of exclusion breed resentments that can ultimately end in civil war. Statelessness – the lack of a legal status, of a right to belong in any state – essentially arises from migration, from the fact that people do not necessarily remain in the place where they were born and among people who have known them since birth, in a community where they share a language, culture and physical resemblance with the majority of its members. Of course, statelessness is not a necessary result of migration: but statelessness may result when people migrate and lose access to (the possibility of) documentation of their nationality or where the legal and administrative framework does not allow them to change nationality or their children to become nationals of the new country. Migration within West Africa is not a new phenomenon, but its magnitude is increasing, and is likely to continue to do so, as mobility becomes easier, information about opportunities more accessible, pressures on land intensify, and the impacts of climate change become more keenly felt; and as conflict continues to affect the sub-region.305 Systems for the integration of migrant populations into the countries where they have established their lives are urgently needed, or they may become a source of instability in themselves. 6.1. When is lack of identity documentation evidence of statelessness? Lack of documentation is in part just one symptom of more general weaknesses in the state. A very large number of people in West Africa have no documents because they don’t see the point of having documents, and because they are costly in time and money to obtain. The first point of need is often when a child should enter school or needs to take an exam, but if schools are inaccessible or worthless (either objectively or as a matter of opinion), then what need for birth registration? If you remain entirely in the informal sector, a peasant farmer or transhumant pastoralist, then identity documents are not required; if the police demand money when you cross a border or an internal checkpoint whether or not you have the right documents, then a passport or identity card does not serve even its 305 On climate change, see UNHCR, Forced displacement in the context of climate change: Challenges for states under international law, 2009. 88