Nationality and Cases of Statelessness in the Middle East and North Africa on the emergence of the MENA’s contemporary nationality laws and what factors have influenced their content. In the next chapter of this report, a detailed comparative analysis will therefore be provided of how access to nationality is regulated across the MENA region. 2.1 Historic and traditional influences on MENA countries’ nationality policy Existing publications have dealt, in detail, with the origins of nationality law in the Middle East and North Africa.46 Extracting details from rather than seeking to duplicate this information, what follows here is a very brief overview of some of the principal historic and traditional influences on nationality policy in the region. These are essentially threefold: the legacy of the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire, the enduring imprint of French and British nationality law left following colonial and mandate rule and the role of the region’s dominant cultural/societal (Arab) and religious (Muslim) perspectives on the content of nationality law. 46 - See, for instance, N. Butenschon, U. Davis and M. Hassassian (eds), Citizenship and the State in the Middle East. Approaches and Applications, Syracuse University Press, 2000; G. Parolin, Citizenship in the Arab World. Kin, Religion and Nation State, Amsterdam University Press, 2009. 44