Biometric Technology at the Borders of Citizenship 333 destroyed in disasters, and looting/misappropriation thereof, or fraudulent claims of having lost or been deprived of them; (2) deterioration of data infrastructure and disruption of data services that were used inter alia for identity onboarding; (3) reconfiguration of on-the-ground geometries of ethnical affiliation and community belonging, which might impact the availability, profile (i.e. recruiting criteria), care, and/or trustworthiness of introducers. 6 Borderline Citizenship, Third Scenario: Stateless Individuals Statelessness is a particularly disadvantageous condition for individuals, as they will be placed outside the protective scope of any domestic legal regime, lack access to welfare benefits, and be denied civil-political rights, along with property entitlements and access to their own saving and accounts (La Lumia 2022). It is also dangerous, as it places them under threat by criminal actors and law enforcers alike: stateless individuals can neither denounce abuse by authorities, nor expect the latter to protect them from criminality. More accurately, they may well denounce abuse and crime, but the follow-up is probably going to prove inattentive and ineffective. This is why, as remarked by Kingston (2019, 57), [s]tatelessness is recognized not only as a violation of the “right to a nationality” but also as a root cause of additional rights abuses. […] Legal status is only one step in a long journey toward full rights protection; statelessness is both a cause of marginalization and a symptom of it. That is, most stateless populations lack legal nationality because they face systematic discrimination from the beginning. This reads rather obvious to anyone who has perused statelessness statistics: the vast majority of stateless individuals was born in conflict areas, failed/fragile States, or contended territories. They might have preferred to relinquish their citizenship to escape persecution, as an alternative to applying as refugees; or they might not have been granted citizenship at birth by hostile and/or incapable regimes. The most pressing statelessness-related emergency is faced by Sub-Saharan African countries, where large segments of the population are totally unrecorded; the relevancy for statelessness is that when these individuals submit petitions to regularise their position and be officially censed, they are not issued any proof of identity, let alone one they can travel internationally with. While they are technically citizens of their country, they cannot prove it to its authorities, nor to any authorities abroad; hence, they live as de facto stateless individuals (Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion 2017, 26). De facto statelessness is indeed the condition of those who are