EDITORIAL MICHELLE FOSTER * AND LAURA VAN WAAS † Over the past few months while this volume of the Statelessness & Citizenship Review (‘SCR’) has been in development, the COVID-19 pandemic has taken hold across the planet, operating as a magnifying glass that has brought into sharper focus many pre-existing structural inequalities and societal tensions. It did not take long for the picture to emerge that while the pandemic ‘devastate(s) lives and livelihoods around the world [it is] hitting the most vulnerable the hardest’. 1 While the virus itself does not discriminate, its impact is not shared equally. For the overwhelming majority of stateless people worldwide, living without a nationality already meant hardship and a constant battle with the effects of structural discrimination and exclusion. Long-standing issues such as denial of healthcare, lack of access to socio-economic safety nets and inability to obtain identity documentation are significantly amplified during a time of acute emergency. As the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees has observed in this context, ‘the right to a nationality is a fundamental human right and in this time of crisis it can mean the difference between life or death’. 2 The pandemic has demonstrated that capturing data and sharing knowledge about the causes and consequences of statelessness is more pressing than ever. UN leaders and human rights experts have consistently reiterated that ‘exclusion is costly and inclusion pays’, 3 urging governments to adopt measures that are inclusive. There is a vital role for research in providing supporting evidence to ensure a needs-based response to the pandemic and in demonstrating the particularities of statelessness as a circumstance to be factored into the crisis response. Regrettably, there is likely also to be an important part to be played by academia in documenting how, where and why COVID-19 and related measures are failing to adequately reach the world’s stateless or indeed how the position of some communities is being further deteriorated by the pandemic — to pave the way for accountability in the future and to share lessons learned. At the same time, COVID-19 has forced open a space for unprecedented new conversations about mobility, policies towards immigration detention and homelessness, state surveillance, racism and xenophobia. This also creates a unique moment for scholarship on citizenship and statelessness to revisit the bigger questions that * † 1 2 3 Michelle Foster is Professor and Director of the Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness at Melbourne Law School. Dr Laura van Waas is a founder and Co-Director of the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, as well as an Assistant Professor at Tilburg Law School in The Netherlands. António Guterres, ‘The COVID-19 Crisis Is An Opportunity to Reimagine Human Mobility’, United Nations (Web Page, 3 June 2020) <https://www.un.org/en/coronavirus/covid-19crisis-opportunity-reimagine-human-mobility> (‘COVID-19 Crisis Is An Opportunity’). Filippo Grandi, cited in ‘UNHCR Warns Stateless People Risk Being Left Behind in Coronavirus Response’, UNHCR (Web Page, 11 May 2020) <https://www.unhcr.org/news/press/2020/5/5eb952222ec/unhcr-warns-stateless-people-riskbehind-coronavirus-response.html>. COVID-19 Crisis Is An Opportunity (n 1).