Journal of Human Rights 2025, VOL. 24, NO. 2, 182–198 https://doi.org/10.1080/14754835.2025.2477493 Intersectionality as method for human rights research: Identifying who is made stateless and how through UN treaty body reviews Allison J. Petrozziello Toronto Metropolitan University ABSTRACT Few theories have generated the kind of international and interdisciplinary engagement as intersectionality. Nevertheless, intersectionality as a research paradigm has yet to gain ground in human rights research. People can experience the same rights violation on multiple grounds, yet human rights research design and methods—like rights frameworks and treaty bodies themselves—tend to examine each form of discrimination separately or additively. This article demonstrates the value of intersectionality as a methodological approach for human rights research by discussing feminist methodological insights developed through a global qualitative study of exclusionary birth registration practices that lead to statelessness. The discussion highlights three intersections that block access to birth certificates: gender, religious, and ethnic discrimination at the civil registrar; disability and ethnic discrimination in contexts of mobility; and discrimination based on gender, race, and migration status in reproductive healthcare. The conclusion offers human rights researchers an intersectional method for analyzing observations from all human rights mechanisms on a particular issue, to gain a more fulsome understanding of the operations of power that violate rights. Introduction Few theories have generated the kind of international and interdisciplinary engagement as intersectionality. First coined by Crenshaw (1989), the idea of intersectionality seeks to capture the multiplicity of structural causes of discriminatory treatment and the consequences in people’s lives. Intersectionality can be used as both theory and method for unpacking the complex causal factors of human rights violations, such as statelessness, as well as the specific ways in which diverse people who are stateless experience this condition (Brennan et al., 2021). Many social sciences have begun elaborating intersectional analytical and methodological approaches (Bailey et al., 2019; Grabe, 2020; Haynes et al., 2020; Lutz, 2015; MacKinnon, 2013). Nevertheless, intersectionality as a research paradigm has yet to gain ground in human rights research, with a few notable exceptions (discussed in the next section). People can experience the same rights violation on multiple grounds, yet human rights research design and methods—like rights frameworks and treaty bodies themselves—tend to examine each form of discrimination separately or additively. Similarly, rights violations are often studied CONTACT Allison J. Petrozziello apetrozziello@torontomu.ca Department of Politics and Public Administration, Toronto Metropolitan University, 380 Victoria Street, Toronto, ON M5B 2K3, Canada. © 2025 The Author(s). Published with license by Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.