AHMR African Human Mobilty Review - Volume 8 No 3, SEP-DEC 2022 Editorial From the Margins to the Mainstream?: Bridging the Scholarship Gap on Statelessness in Africa Benyam Dawit Mezmur* and Charissa Fawole** * Eleanor Roosevelt Fellow, Human Rights Program, Harvard Law School  bmezmur@law.harvard.edu and Professor of Law, Faculty of Law, University of Western Cape, South Africa.  bmezmur@uwc.ac.za ** Lecturer in the Department of Public Law, University of Johannesburg, South Africa.  charissaf@uj.ac.za I. INTRODUCTION As has been the case in a number of other major global sporting events, the 2022 international football tournament — the FIFA World Cup — has attracted attention to the issue of nationality. The New York Times published an article titled ‘At This World Cup, Nationality Is a Fluid Concept’, in which it underscored that ‘[m]ore than 130 players at the World Cup represent a country other than that of their birth’. Qatar, the host country, for example, has a diverse team of whom a reported 38 per cent are not native-born Qataris.1 Such fluidity is also underscored in a BBC piece titled ‘Ghana at World Cup: How to dribble around nationality issues’ where the country’s relatively strict nationality laws ‘do not extend to the country’s football team’.2 A fair dose of debate around the nationality of players has also unfolded too on social media, including questions around the fact the son of the President of Liberia (and soccer superstar), Timothy Weah, is playing for the United States instead of Liberia. These and other similar discussions on nationality matters are interesting, but (hopefully, less arguably) they are neither the most important nor pressing debates. Rather, the issue of stateless persons — by definition ‘a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’ — is a more crucial aspect of the topic as it often has serious implications for human rights, security, and Stephen Osserman & Youyou Zhou ‘How migration has shaped the World Cup’ (08 December 2022), available at https:// www.vox.com/c/world/2022/12/8/23471181/how-migration-has-shaped-the-world-cup 2 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) ‘Ghana at World Cup: How to dribble around nationality issues’ (1 December 2022), available at https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-63795721 1 4