Journal of Human Rights 183 as individual harms, even when the situation producing the violation is experienced relationally. This article demonstrates the value of intersectionality as a methodological approach for human rights research by discussing feminist methodological insights developed through the construction of a global inventory of UN treaty body recommendations on exclusionary birth registration practices that lead to statelessness (Petrozziello, 2023). An estimated 150 million children under the age of five (around two in 10) remain unregistered (UN Children’s Fund [UNICEF], 2024), and roughly 15 million people are stateless (Institute on Statelessness & Inclusion, 2014). Intersectionality provides a framework for asking fundamental questions about who (which groups of people) are being blocked from registering births and potentially produced as stateless, by whom (who is wielding this power, how, and in what institutional and social locations), and in what ways diverse individuals experience and resist different forms and combinations of oppressions. The study shows how a relational perspective—in this instance, the mother–child dyad1—enables linked-up thinking about connections between different types of rights violations, and how an intersectional approach can reveal patterns and mechanisms of exclusion of multiple marginalized population groups. The article opens with a brief review of the human rights literature on intersectionality, followed by a discussion of the limited ways intersectionality has been used to study statelessness. The bulk of the article focuses on how intersectionality was mobilized methodologically in a global qualitative study on exclusion from birth registration. Because the article is primarily focused on methods rather than empirics, it does not present the full range of findings.2 Rather, the penultimate section discusses three intersectional insights that emerged, around gender, religious and ethnic discrimination at the civil registrar; disability and ethnic discrimination in mobility contexts; and gender, racial, and migration status discrimination in reproductive healthcare. The article concludes by offering human rights researchers an intersectional method for analyzing concluding observations from all relevant human rights mechanisms on a particular issue, to gain a more fulsome understanding of the operations of power that violate rights. A theoretical focus on intersectionality and relationality prompts new, linked-up thinking and methods for human rights research. Intersectionality in human rights research Intersectionality is considered one of the most important theoretical contributions of women and gender studies, in conjunction with critical race theory and related fields (McCall, 2005, p. 1771). First proposed by US Black feminist scholars Crenshaw (1989) and Hill Collins (2008) and long practiced by feminists and women of color in new social movements in the Global North and South (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016), intersectional feminist theory can be used to understand multiple kinds of power relations and rights violations as they manifest within global politics. Taking an intersectional feminist approach places power at the center of the analysis, and then examines the axes along which those power relations turn—race, gender, and social class being the triumvirate—and building out from there to account for other factors as relevant, such as migration status, nationality, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, and/or gender identity. Although it has become somewhat of a buzzword in recent years (Davis, 2008) and has been critiqued for its vagueness (Hancock, 2016), intersectionality remains useful because of its potential for capturing complexity (Hill Collins & Bilge, 2016; McCall, 2005). As Davis put it, “Intersectionality initiates a process of discovery, alerting us to the fact that the world around us is always more complicated and contradictory than we ever could have anticipated” (2008, p. 79). Despite its widespread and interdisciplinary uptake, in the human rights field, scholars, activists, and the UN system itself have been slow to embrace the insights of intersectionality (Bond, 2021). This means that the protection offered to women experiencing intersecting forms of discrimination is inadequate under current international law (Bond, 2021; Celorio, 2022, 2024; Davis, 2015; Xanthaki, 2019). In the limited human rights literature that does take an intersectional approach, it is mostly used as an analytical tool to unpack some of the complexities