306 D. Owen building the capacities and dispositions of states or even of encouraging more inclusive and pluralistic conceptions of political community, but of establishing institutions and practices that can effectively contest state practices and judgments where this means that the international order of states recognizes that it is accountable to individuals for the condition of de jure statelessness. To address the form of this accountability, however, requires not merely an effective norm against de jure statelessness, but an account of the point and purpose of the institution of citizenship in a global political society organised as an international order of states. To put the point hyperbolically, the problem of de jure statelessness could be formally resolved by a global citizenship lottery in which, at birth, each individual was randomly allocated a state nationality. Yet this would not be a solution in anything other than a notional formal sense, rather what is needed is a normative conception of the institution of state citizenship that identifies which persons have legitimate claims to membership of which state. To see this point, consider how Allerton illustrates her point that Malaysia, in the practice of its law, avoids the norm against de jure statelessness: For example, in a 2015 case, a Malaysian father’s application for citizenship for his 5-year-old son was rejected. Since the parents were not married at the time of the boy’s birth, the judge stated that the boy should follow his birth mother’s nationality. The fact that the boy’s mother was a Thai national, who disappeared when he was 6 months old and has never been tracked down, was deemed irrelevant. The judge ruled that the boy (who had lived all his life in Malaysia) could apply for Thai citizenship and was therefore not a stateless child.23 If we abstract this case from the generalised context of restricting access to citizenship in which it is embedded and accept that the child could apply for Thai citizenship under the practice of Thai law, the question that arises is why Malaysia has a responsibility to admit this child to citizenship, that is, why this child has a legitimate claim to Malaysian nationality. The answer to this question is not given simply by an international norm against de jure statelessness. I will take up this question of the claim not simply to a nationality but to this nationality in the next section within the high stakes context of citizenship deprivation. 3 On the Right not to be Arbitrarily Deprived of One’s Nationality For individuals who have acquired an effective nationality, the key issue becomes that of their right to this nationality, that is, their right not to be arbitrarily deprived of it. Our focus in this section thus addresses the conditionality of citizenship and will focus on two types of example: mass denaturalisation and individual denaturalisation. 23 Allerton (2017), p. 251. 123