On the Right to Have Nationality Rights: Statelessness,… 301 Her comment is directed at political life within states, but the point has general application. My starting point is the presumption that becoming equal members of global political society, organising the equal political standing of individuals in an international order of self-ruling territorial states, requires constructing the right to have nationality rights—and my focus in this essay on the predicaments of nationality rights is concerned to address how we currently stand to such a rightful condition. I adopt the phrase ‘the right to have rights’ in order to highlight the point that merely to be allowed or permitted to have nationality rights at the discretion of states or, more generally, of the international order of states is precisely not to have a right to such rights. This is, as will we see, an issue of considerable contemporary significance and one that directly implicates the legitimacy conditions of the international order of states as a way of organising global political society. The essay proceeds as follows. I begin by addressing the right to a nationality in which my focus is on addressing de jure statelessness (Sect. 2) and the right not to be arbitrarily deprived of one’s nationality in which I concentrate on denationalisation policies (Sect. 3). I then turn to the topic of de facto statelessness and, more generally, the issue of the right to acquire a new nationality (Sect. 4), before concluding by considering the conditions of a right to have nationality rights. 2 On the Right to a Nationality To take up the issue of the right to have the right to a nationality, we can address statelessness in the de jure sense is specified by Article 1 of the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons: ‘the term “stateless person” means a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’. Such statelessness, as the lack of an effective nationality, is both a wrongful condition and a harmful condition. It is a wrongful condition because it represents a failure to secure the fundamental right of individuals to political standing in global political society organized as international order of states. To put the point another way, we can note that the phenomenon of de jure statelessness represents a legitimacy problem for the international order of states. It does so precisely because it is a legitimacy condition of any political order (and, hence, the international order of states) that those who are subject to its rule have political standing in relation to this rule; this is a necessary condition of a political order being an order of right rather than might, of that order giving rise to political obligations rather than being simply a structure of coercively-enforced commands. At the same time, statelessness is a harmful condition because it exposes individuals to radical insecurity in terms of access to rights and resources; it leaves them highly vulnerable to arbitrary exercises of private and public power. Precisely because citizenship has both protective and enabling dimensions, possession of an effective nationality acts as gateway to a range of liberties, resources and powers—and the lack of an effective nationality obstructs access to these protective and enabling conditions of autonomy and well-being. Today, this duality of statelessness as both wrong and harm is widely recognized. 123