Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2019 1(1) rights holder but the actor who inhabits the interstitial field of contestation created by pitting the inscription of rights against the awaited verification of said rights as premised on equality. If the rights that are under contestation are not verified, it shall be established that the subject in question does not have the rights she has, thereby evincing ‘the contradictions of a social order which presupposes equality but simultaneously disavows it’. 26 Conversely, the verification of said rights shall establish that the subject has the rights she has not, whereby dissensus sees the prevailing social consensus — the given — reimagined to include as free and equal the once excluded, with the rights that were heretofore denied now free to be claimed and enacted. In sum, dissensus is a conceptual tool that can be deployed to intervene ‘into always particular situations, specific instances in which ideas are “at work”’ 27 to restore agency to disadvantaged and oppressed groups of insiders who struggle to have their rights respected, protected and fulfilled. For this very reason, dissensus can be applied to all manner of social settings marked by tension, for it is a conceptual tool that is necessarily malleable, and when harnessed accordingly, can be attuned to both account for and yield to the specificities of a given context, including that of Up-Country Sri Lanka. The third component of the conceptual framework used in this study is a human rights analysis grounded in the notions of access and entitlement given that such an analysis reveals if this population’s rights to healthcare, education, employment and political participation are fulfilled, and if certain segments of this population are better able to secure the rights they have been guaranteed more so than others. This allows for an assessment of whether recently ordained citizens have either access or entitlement to the human rights that are said to be theirs by virtue of their citizenship, it reveals who among this population has secured said access or entitlement, and allows those incapable of seizing their rights to emerge in the analysis. A normative understanding of human rights is henceforth adopted because it is the concept of human rights that animates discussions and appraisals of injustice at the international scale, and for which an expansive body of international law has been developed. Further, Sri Lanka’s membership in the United Nations is enough to warrant an investigation of their human rights practices by contrasting how things are with how they ought to be. B The UNHCR #IBELONG Campaign In summary, the #IBELONG Campaign aims to ‘resolve existing situations of statelessness, prevent new cases of statelessness from emerging, and better identify and protect stateless persons’ by 2024. 28 To this end, a Global Action Plan has been designed to meet this goal, and is comprised of 10 key ‘Actions’: resolve existing major situations of statelessness; ensure no child is born stateless; remove gender discrimination from nationality laws; prevent denial, loss or deprivation of nationality on discriminatory grounds; prevent statelessness in cases of state succession; grant protection status to stateless migrants and facilitate their 26 27 28 Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (Continuum 2010) 9. Rancière, ‘Who is the Subject of the Rights of Man?’ (n 19); Paul Bowman and Richard Stamp, Reading Rancière: Critical Dissensus (Continuum 2011) xii. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Global Action Plan to End Statelessness (Special Report, 4 November 2014) <https://www.unhcr.org/enau/protection/statelessness/54621bf49/global-action-plan-end-statelessness-20142024.html> (‘Global Action Plan’). 10