Expanding Statelessness Scholarship
dignity is unlikely to be a realistic possibility’. 5 To consider statelessness in
isolation reduces it to a legal gap, a bureaucratic oversight, a glitch that can be
remedied with a state ID card or passport. If statelessness was really only about a
lack of legal status brought about by exclusion from a nationality law or
unregistered babies, for instance its impacts would not be so devastating and
its solutions would be infinitely easier to realise.
The truth is that statelessness is both a cause and a symptom of marginalisation;
that is, ‘most stateless populations lack legal nationality because they are part of a
marginalized group that faces systematic discrimination and oppression from the
start. Their circumstances are greatly harmed by their statelessness, yet the
acquisition of legal nationality alone will not ensure their access to human rights’. 6
This complexity is why I argue that a narrow emphasis on citizenship acquisition
as a ‘solution’ for statelessness is misguided, and that legal status is only ‘one step
in a long journey toward full rights protection’. 7 My longstanding interest in the
issue of statelessness and hence, my sympathy for the desire to create a field of
‘statelessness studies’ is tempered by my fear that we will inadvertently isolate
our scholarship and overly narrow our focus. This would be to the detriment of
stateless individuals themselves, who might benefit from the social and policy
change our work could help bring about.
As I watch the study of statelessness become increasingly centred in law
schools (and to a lesser extent, political science programs), I am reminded of the
importance of interdisciplinarity for understanding social issues and rights abuses.
Human rights scholars have been resisting disciplinary limitations for years,
emphasising the need for research and teaching collaboration across academic
fields. This is certainly true in my own work, which is heavily influenced by
diverse perspectives in the fields of political science/international relations,
anthropology, history, philosophy and sociology, among others. Indeed, I draw
from varying perspectives to argue that hierarchies of personhood inequalities
that render some people more ‘worthy’ than others for protections and political
membership have been created and perpetuated around the world. 8 This is also
true in my approach to human rights education (‘HRE’) at Webster’s Institute for
Human Rights and Humanitarian Studies (which I co-founded and currently
direct) where faculty fellows from a wide array of academic disciplines teach in
the undergraduate program and collaborate on research, advocacy and outreach
projects. Indeed, we argue that HRE in higher education has the capacity for
positive change within institutions, classrooms and communities. 9
While statelessness continues to gain attention from scholars and the broader
international community, it is noteworthy that existing work has already laid an
interdisciplinary foundation for future research and education. For example, we
5
6
7
8
9
Jack Donnelly and Daniel J Whelan, International Human Rights (Westview, 5th edn, 2018)
26 (emphasis in original).
Lindsey N Kingston, ‘Worthy of Rights: Statelessness as a Cause and Symptom of
Marginalization’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Philip Cole (eds), Understanding
Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 17−18.
ibid 17.
Despite human rights norms to the contrary, some people’s rights and dignity are more valued
and respected than others; in a sense, some are accepted as more ‘fully human’ than others.
See Lindsey N Kingston, Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights (Oxford
University Press 2019).
Lindsey N Kingston (ed), Human Rights in Higher Education: Institutional, Classroom, and
Community Approaches to Teaching Social Justice (Palgrave Macmillan 2018).
167