38.2 (7) TEMPROSA.DOCX38.2 (7) TEMPROSA.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 2020] STATELESSNESS AS RHETORIC 1/16/2021 12:59 PM 245 or is not, the 1954 Statelessness Convention's definition betrays the very purpose of the 1954 Statelessness Convention, which is to assure that people have the widest possible exercise of fundamental rights and freedoms. 17 That is the paradox. The 1954 Statelessness Convention wrongly assumed that stateless determinations are a straightforward, clinical process of applying citizenship law, and that a State can always rightly determine whether another State "considers" a person a citizen. While it recognizes the power of the State to grant or withhold citizenship, it does not take into account that if the State has discretion over citizenship matters, then statelessness can also be discretionary. It is not always black or white. This Article is the first to critically theorize international law's definition of statelessness in design rhetoric to build the case for 'revisioning' the definition. In this way, we can develop a new vision of statelessness and revise international law. For the purposes of this Article, statelessness pertains to the definition in the 1954 Statelessness Convention. Using statelessness determination cases, I analyze international law's definition of statelessness and argue that international law's definition has discretionary features and facets. The definition does more than accord States with discretion. It allows States to constitute and ordain who is stateless, and therefore, decide who is entitled to the benefits of the 1954 Statelessness Convention, which establishes specific protections and rights to the stateless. It also entrenches and reifies State power over citizenship matters. My central argument is that international law's definition of statelessness operates in a rhetoric that privileges the State, and because of this, should be revisioned. Without this revisioning, the statelessness regime, decisively converging with human rights principles, loses its emancipatory power. Drawing insights from critical rhetoric as theory, I explore ideologies that animate and persist in the determinations of statelessness. 18 Critical rhetoric "examines the dimensions of domination and freedom as these are exercised in a Stateless persons differ from refugees. Although a person may simultaneously be stateless and a refugee, the 1951 Refugee Convention adequately addresses the situation of refugees. Stateless persons can qualify for refugee status if they are unable to return to their country of habitual residence owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for a reason listed in the Refugee Convention. Where a stateless refugee seeks rights from a State that is not a party to the Refugee Convention, however, their stateless status must still be determined. See FOSTER & LAMBERT, infra note 57, at 422. 17. See 1954 Statelessness Convention, supra note 16, at Preamble (“to assure stateless persons the widest possible exercise of these fundamental rights and freedoms”). 18. Critical rhetoric is "[a] perspective on rhetoric that explores, in theoretical and practical terms, the implications of a theory that is divorced from the constraints of a Platonic conception." See Raymie E. McKerrow, Critical Rhetoric: Theory and Praxis, 56 COMM. MONOGRAPHS 91 (1989). Although related, critical rhetoric should not be confused with "critical legal rhetoric," which is legal analysis that critiques claims about the nature of the law. For a discussion of the basic distinction, see Lolita Buckner Inniss, 'Other Spaces' in Legal Pedagogy, 28 HARV. J. RACIAL & ETHNIC JUST. 67, 72 (2012). Critical legal rhetoric has developed its own basic assumptions that are focused on domestic law, particularly the domestic law of the United States. See generally MAROUF HASAIN, JR., LEGAL MEMORIES AND AMNESIAS IN AMERICA'S RHETORICAL CULTURE (2000). I relate it now to international law.