Statelessness as a Product of Slippery Statecraft decisions, perhaps indefinitely’. 44 In line with the neoliberal logic of exception, assigning ambiguous and temporary legal status gives governments the flexibility to manage labour migration to compete in the global economy, while restricting the terms of the social contract. Following Rygiel and Walton-Roberts’ idea of slippery statecraft, we might also turn to the security logic which operates in tandem with this neoliberal economic logic. 45 States’ capacity to provide security is part and parcel of the sovereign social contract, which again hinges on the definition of who is a citizen. Governments around the world have come under increasing pressure in the post9/11 era to document their populations and strengthen identity management systems, ostensibly as a means of distinguishing between friend and foe. 46 Following a similar logic of political exception as it applies to state processes of securitisation, ‘the citizen that needs to be secured is not the same as the secured citizen’. 47 Contributors to Peter Nyers’ volume Securitizations of Citizenship use the Foucauldian concept of biopolitics to examine the reconfiguring of relationships between security, territory, population and citizenship. 48 Biometric technologies — finger printing, retinal scans, facial recognition and the like — are a pervasive means of identity verification employed by developed and developing states alike, through generous financing by the World Bank and others. 49 Benjamin Muller sees the shift toward citizenship as identity management as both politicising and depoliticising. 50 On one hand, the bureaucratised realm of identity management would seem to limit possibilities for discrimination, purging out the ‘ugly politics of us and them, friends and enemies, inclusion and exclusion’, 51 thus depoliticising questions of identity and security. However, Benjamin Muller, 52 Bronwen Manby and others have shown that in practice biometric technologies simply conceal ongoing racial/ethnic profiling, suggesting that the usual exclusionary politics persist. 53 Biopolitics redraws borders on bodies of populations subject to surveillance, playing a central role in globalising regimes of population management. 54 When biometrics combine with record-breaking levels of displacement, irregular migration and exclusionary othering, people who do not fit into pre-conceived categories slide further down that slippery slope toward statelessness — which, again, is not accidental, but part of neoliberal statecraft. Just as racial and ethnic discrimination feature in processes of state formation, so do they persist in projects of state modernisation, generating a risk of statelessness in situ. In her book on statelessness among persons of Haitian descent 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 Noora A Lori, ‘Statelessness, “In-Between” Statuses, and Precarious Citizenship’ in Ayelet Shachar et al (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship (Oxford University Press 2017), 744. Rygiel and Walton-Roberts (n 11) 211. ibid. Peter Nyers (ed), Securitizations of citizenship (Routledge 2009) 3. ibid. Lori (n 44) 749–50. Benjamin J Muller, ‘(Dis)Qualified Bodies: Securitization, Citizenship and “Identity Management”’ in Peter Nyers (ed) Securitizations of Citizenship (Routledge 2009) 78. ibid. ibid. Bronwen Manby, Citizenship in Africa: The Law of Belonging (Hart 2018). Kim Rygiel, Globalizing Citizenship (University of British Columbia Press 2010). 143