6 MANLY AND van waas and their countries. It can strain relations between family and community members, but also between states, as individuals and governments struggle to deal with the consequences of statelessness. Increasingly then, there is an awareness that the study of statelessness must evolve beyond the study of statelessness law. There is an evident need to explore statelessness from an interdisciplinary perspective, to better understand why this extreme form of exclusion is allowed to happen – and why it can so stubbornly persist – and what its true impact is on the lives of individuals, the fabric of communities and the integrity of the modern nation-state system. The growing discovery of statelessness as a subject of study by anthropologists, social scientists, historians, philosophers, political scientists, psychologists and economists presents incredible opportunities for broadening the statelessness research agenda.10 In many instances, academic work which relates to statelessness has not been labelled as such and has therefore gone unperceived by others working on similar issues and populations but in different disciplines.11 At the same time, new and complex challenges are also coming to light with respect to research methodology,12 which must be addressed if statelessness is to become fully established as an interdisciplinary research field. A persistent challenge remains the question of definition: who is stateless? A better understanding of ‘who is stateless’, according to international law, will help ensure increased comparability of research findings and development of a common basis for discussion. 10 11 12 As also evidenced by the variety of contributions to this special edition Tilburg Law Review, a number of which have been prepared by scholars from other disciplines. For example, research by human rights organisations on migrant labour in South East Asia has almost universally overlooked the fact that very large numbers of former Indonesian nationals lost their nationality under the nationality law in force from 1958 until 2006 on account of residence abroad for more than five years. Similarly, until recently, most research on the situation of migrants and refugees from Zimbabwe did not address the high incidence of statelessness, which resulted from the country’s 2001 Citizenship Amendment Act. These research challenges include: low levels of general awareness or knowledge of statelessness globally; difficulties inherent in identifying research subjects in countries where stateless people are a hidden population; efficiently and accurately establishing statelessness in the field research (e.g. survey) context; political sensitivities surrounding some stateless populations or use of particular terminology; and the absence of baseline data in many countries, including a lack of historic data for stateless populations to enable comparisons over time. tilburg law review 19 (2014) 3-10