Statelessness as a Product of Slippery Statecraft discrimination. 138 The central problem of UNHCR’s mode of intervention, argues Kelly Staples, is that it ignores the politics of recognition and the ‘state part of statelessness’. 139 UNHCR’s insistence on determining the place where a particular group belongs, despite a state’s unwillingness to recognise them, may actually put the group they are seeking to protect at risk. Staples cites the example of UNHCR’s repatriation of stateless Rohingya to Myanmar between 1992 and 1995, which has had devastating consequences. 140 To this, I might add the example of UNHCR’s biometric identification and creation of a database not only of the Rohingya in camps in Bangladesh, but also of thousands of stateless Dominicans of Haitian descent, which the agency plans to deliver to the Dominican government as proof of the existence of statelessness in country. 141 No solution has been negotiated for their recognition as nationals, and the lack of political will is abundantly clear. Making legible a population which a given state is unwilling to recognise is not only ineffectual; it is unethical. International human rights law has been a fundamental tool for curbing states’ use and abuse of sovereign power. Yet the human rights framework may not be enough to eliminate statelessness since, as we have seen, the ability to access human rights hinges on state recognition. Hannah Arendt, too, suggested that a lesson of the twentieth century was the fallacy and naivete of believing that human rights can be defended by legal means alone. 142 Yet, the UNHCR Global Action Plan, ISI and the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights place much emphasis on the relationship between nationality law and statelessness, when in fact other factors are at play, such as weak institutions, poor infrastructure, conflict, political instability and of course, discrimination. 143 Perhaps most problematic is the assumption that discrimination on the basis of race or gender, as a causal factor of statelessness, can be eliminated primarily through legislative reform. Doubtful, too, is the assertion that states can end statelessness. Critical scholarship on statelessness suggests that it is not only a phenomenon, but endemic to the very structure of the international state system. 144 Seeing persons without a state affirms the rather obvious: the modern sovereign state constitutes its citizenry, and not the other way around. 145 Manipulation of citizenship is similar to states ‘making people illegal’ 146 or what Anne McNevin refers to as the vicious cycle between border control and irregular migration. 147 Sovereign states wield citizenship as an instrument of governance, fundamental to their interpretation of rights obligations and also to the regulation of movement between states. Some 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 Staples (n 82) 178–80. ibid 173. ibid 175. This is based on the author’s fieldnotes from research in the Dominican Republic, 2015–17. Serena Parekh, Hannah Arendt and the Challenge of Modernity: A Phenomenology of Human Rights (Routledge 2008) 50. Staples (n 82) 182. Bloom, Tonkiss and Cole (n 25) 4–5; Patrick Hayden, ‘From Exclusion to Containment: Arendt, Sovereign Power, and Statelessness” (2008) 3(2) Societies Without Borders 248, 267. Monika Krause, ‘Undocumented Migrants: an Arendtian perspective’ (2008) 7(3) European Journal of Political Theory 331, 338. Catherine Dauvergne, Making People Illegal: What Globalization Means for Migration and the Law (Cambridge University Press 2008). Anne McNevin, ‘Learning to Live With Irregular Migration: Towards a More Ambitious Debate on the Politics of “the Problem”’ (2017) 21(3) Citizenship Studies 255, 255. 153