38.2 (7) TEMPROSA.DOCX38.2 (7) TEMPROSA.DOCX (DO NOT DELETE) 270 BERKELEY JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL LAW 1/16/2021 12:59 PM [Vol. 38:2 only limited rights in the State, the law assumes a tyrannical structure. 181 People become "subjects but not members of the political community." 182 This dichotomy has been the confounding moral tragedy of the law. Under international law, the State can make stateless persons live with only minimum rights and without full participation in society, 183 subject nonetheless to naturalization if required under the law. This has been the situation ever since international law began allowing statelessness to be contingent on the interests and values of States. 184 Because ideographs, such as statelessness, are equivocal and illdefined, they accommodate "the use of power [and] excuse[] behavior[s] and belief[s]." 185 1. Vicissitudes of Statelessness The ideographic nature of the definition is most pronounced in the vicissitudes of statelessness. Orthodoxy dictates that there are two main ways of interpreting the definition of statelessness. However, despite the international definition of statelessness detailed in Part I.B, not all States have the same understanding of statelessness, even when they refer to the definition in the 1954 Statelessness Convention. Polysemy or "the existence of determinate but non[]singular denotational meanings" 186 is a direct manifestation of the ideograph. There are at least three general ways in which States display their polysemic attitudes toward statelessness. Firstly, some States drop the "operation of law" component of the definition, a direct disregard of its customary nature. In civil law jurisdictions, whose laws specifically provide a definition of statelessness, like Georgia and Panama, reference to "operation of law" is completely omitted from the definition. 187 Betsy L. Fisher demonstrated that Australian and New 181. Odessa Gonzalez Benson & Yoosun Park, Resettled. Yet Stateless: Elderly Monoglot Refugees in the United States as a Limit Case to Citizenship, 10 J. HUM. RTS. PRACT. 423, 430 (2018). 182. Id. 183. See supra note 124, and accompanying text. 184. State interests vary. For example, in the United States, Gerald Neuman's work elucidated that the State looks into ideological qualifications, English-language skills, and renunciation of foreign allegiance. Gerald L. Neuman, Justifying U.S. Naturalization Policies, 16 IMMIGR. & NAT'LITY L. REV. 83 (1994–1995). 185. See McGee, supra note 160, at 15. For a reading of citizenship as a "slippery concept," see THE HUMAN RIGHT TO CITIZENSHIP: A SLIPPERY CONCEPT (Rhoda E. Howard-Hassmann & Margaret Walton-Roberts eds., 2015). While this edited collection uses the term "slippery concept," I argue that citizenship can also be read as an ideograph. 186. Leah Ceccarelli, Polysemy: Multiple Meanings in Rhetorical Criticism, 84(4) Q. J. SPEECH 395, 399 (1998). 187. Law of Georgia on the Legal Status of Aliens and Stateless Persons, art. 2(b), https://www.ilo.org/dyn/natlex/docs/ELECTRONIC/99405/118651/F1390570618/GEO99405%20Eng.pdf (last visited May 6, 2019) (defining a stateless person as "a person who is not considered a citizen by any state under its legislation"). Panama has similarly defined statelessness without reference to operation of law: "A person who is not considered as a national by