Statelessness as a Product of Slippery Statecraft Who might find themselves where along this slippery slope? At the top stand the lucky holders of hard citizenship rights in wealthy, democratic countries. 3 Moving down the gradient we find people on the move who are categorised, documented, sorted and legally produced in a variety of ways: 4 documented and undocumented migrants, recognised and unrecognised refugees, people who have been trafficked and smuggled, all of whom experience degrees of precarity whether in wealthy or less wealthy countries. 5 Also on slippery footing we find: people holding precarious status forms, such as temporary work permits or temporary protection; those whose citizenship in poverty-stricken countries affords them little in the way of rights; and social groups whose citizenship is mediated through discriminatory policies and practices — women, ethnic minorities, racialised people, children and persons of minority sexual orientation. 6 At the bottom of the slope stand the stateless, who are not recognised as citizens by any state but manage to carve out an existence for themselves nonetheless. An estimated ten to fifteen million people have been made stateless. 7 Their condition is often considered as a (hu)man-made problem, occurring as a result of unintentional gaps between citizenship policies excluding individuals who move, form relationships and reproduce across international borders. But what if the production of statelessness is not a technicality, but a slippery strategy that some states use to design the citizenry that they have the political will to protect? This paper provides a critical global governance view of contemporary causes of statelessness, actors working on it and their framing of the issue. A global governance perspective brings into view a panoply of actors operating at levels of governance above and below the state — stateless individuals, an epistemic community convened by a think tank, transnational advocacy networks, UN agencies and campaigns, human rights activists and non-governmental organisations (‘NGOs’) — who come together in a variety of venues to identify solutions for global problems where state action has been found wanting. Mainstream approaches to the study and practice of global governance are often depoliticised and technocratic in nature, focusing on the creation of a policy framework to coordinate action on problems that cross borders. 8 This can be seen in much scholarship and policy work on statelessness, which tend to focus on smoothing out the relationship between individuals and sovereign states rather than analysing exclusionary citizenship as part of the global state system. 9 Critical scholarship on global governance, by contrast, aims to identify sources of conflict and contradiction, opening up space for reconsidering and potentially transforming the prevailing order. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 Ayelet Shachar, The Birthright Lottery: Citizenship and Global Inequality (Harvard University Press 2009). Nicholas De Genova, ‘Migrant “Illegality” and Deportability in Everyday Life’ [2002] Annual Review of Anthropology 419; Heather Johnson, Borders, Asylum and Global NonCitizenship: The Other Side of the Fence (Cambridge University Press 2014). Howard-Hassmann and Walton-Roberts (n 1) 5–6. ibid. United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2016 (Report, 19 June 2017) 2; Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, The World’s Stateless (Wolf Legal Publishers 2014) 11. Shirin M Rai and Georgina Waylen, Global Governance: Feminist Perspectives (Palgrave Macmillan 2008) 2. Shachar (n 3) 5; Bridget Anderson, Us and Them? The Dangerous Politics of Immigration Control (Oxford University Press 2013) 94. 137