Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship exclusion of the stateless — and certainly the issue of statelessness has enjoyed significant advocacy because of efforts made to bring it into the international human rights regime 32 — readers are encouraged to look beyond the law and beyond legal documents, beyond which authority is recognised as a state and which is not, to investigate a context as it really is and as it is experienced by those affected. At the same time, the law remains a vital foundation, underlying everything. Indeed, throughout the contributions in this volume, the authors continually return to law as a vital part of understanding and addressing statelessness. And that is the point. The important critique is not only that a strictly legal approach might not deliver on its promises, but that it is an inherent element or mode of the governance of citizenship, one with real effect and consequence over and above form and legality. Rather than statelessness being (only) an error or bug in the international legal system meaning that the international legal system needs improvement or tweaking, we can see how the international state-based legal order, and international law, have (also) worked to produce statelessness ie that the exclusion of people from the system is structural. 33 The point is that to seek critical distance from the international legal order, we cannot reject or refuse to deal with it. Rather, we need to pay close attention to its histories, operation and effect in context. That can help us to disrupt orthodox thinking, to stretch out beyond the binaries of legal or illegal, citizen or non-citizen, states and non-state actors. We can also see statelessness in a different temporal light. Rather than simply being ‘a human rights issue that landed on the doorstep of international law requiring legal remedy’, 34 we could start to see that statelessness has been ‘produced in the collisions between empire, sovereignty, self-determination and internationalism’; 35 that statelessness is a symptom of historic discrimination within the practices of governance of citizenship and migration. Future legal responses inspired by the contributions within this book therefore need to grapple with that real, messy and subtle reality. This book makes clear that those future efforts need to rely on the multiple perspectives and voices of people affected by statelessness. Those future efforts need to be interdisciplinary, intersectional, 36 and seeking comprehension of context not only in legal terms, but historically, socially, emotionally and politically, local, transnational and international. In this sense, the individual chapters will be fascinating and useful for students, scholars and practitioners to dip into. Most importantly, seen as a whole, the volume can be commended for starting the hard work of inserting tiny fragments of coloured glass, worn smooth by the sea of lived experiences, into what will eventually become a far larger mosaic helping us to understand and think differently about the complexities of the governance of citizenship — including the role of law — in relation to the question of statelessness. 32 33 34 35 36 See Kingston, ‘Conceptualizing Statelessness as a Human Rights Challenge: Framing, Visual Representation, and (Partial) Issue Emergence’ (2019) 11 Journal of Human Rights Practice 52, 68; Michelle Foster and Hélène Lambert, ‘Statelessness as a Human Rights Issue: A Concept Whose Time Has Come’ (2016) 28(4) International Journal of Refugee Law 564. Phillip Cole, ‘Insider Theory and the Construction of Statelessness’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 255. Natalie Brinham, ‘Statelessness: A Modern History by Mira L Siegelberg (Harvard University Press)’ (2021) 3(1) Statelessness & Citizenship Review 163. ibid. Deirdre Brennan, Nina Murray and Allison J Petrozziello, ‘Asking the “Other Questions”: Applying Intersectionality to Understand Statelessness in Europe’ in Tendayi Bloom and Lindsey N Kingston (eds), Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester University Press 2021) 222, 230–31. 365