2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(1) or the Rohingya vis-à-vis Myanmar (Burma). The 1961 Convention set out safeguards to prevent statelessness due to state succession, but also recognised limited situations in which states can deprive a person of his or her nationality, even if this would leave them stateless. 24 This brief overview traces how statelessness emerged as an international concern within a particular set of circumstances, which continue to influence its conceptualisation today. In their recent volume, Understanding Statelessness, Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss, and Phillip Cole identify three key moments in thinking about statelessness: 1) post-WWII when statelessness was considered exception; 2) the beginning of the twenty-first century when statelessness became a phenomenon; and 3) 2013 onward with statelessness seen as endemic or even symptomatic of modernity. 25 Despite having moved on from the moment of exception, statelessness is most often associated with interstate conflict, decolonisation and state formation, forced displacement and the refugee cycle. While these crisis-driven causes are still at work in the world today, exclusion from citizenship is occurring gradually through institutional means as well. The next section considers some of the contemporary factors which are fuelling the phenomenon of statelessness in the early twenty-first century. CONTEMPORARY CAUSES OF STATELESSNESS Contemporary causes of statelessness must be understood within the context of neoliberal globalisation and the politically charged issues of international labour migration, securitisation and persistent discrimination. The messy politics of global migration governance stand in sharp contrast to the depoliticised language of birth registration and child protection measures to combat statelessness, which are discussed later in the paper. Recent literature on (non)citizenship offers a lens through which to begin to identify risk factors for statelessness. 26 Many of these derive from states’ manipulation of citizenship as a means of governing human mobility. By parsing out factors related to identity, security, mobility, and reorganising them into a variety of new status forms, citizenship is made precarious for noncitizens and completely out of reach for the stateless. While stateless people share a similar lot with other noncitizens — such as irregular migrants, asylum seekers and their children — their situation is also particular insofar as recognition by a state, any state, continues to be the sine qua non for securing access to the full range of one’s human rights. Precarity is a permanent condition for the stateless, and they may even be penalised for ‘unlawful’ presence by the very state that made them so in the first place by denying citizenship. 27 24 25 26 27 1961 Convention (n 23) arts 8(2)–(3), 10. Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss, and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 4. See, eg, Katherine Tonkiss and Tendayi Bloom, ‘Theorising Noncitizenship: Concepts, Debates and Challenges’ (2015) 19(8) Citizenship Studies 837; David Owen ‘Republicanism and the Constitution of Migrant Statuses’ (2014) 17(1) Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 90; Marit Hovdal-Moan ‘Unequal Residence Statuses and the Ideal of Non-Domination’ (2014) 17(1) Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy 70. Belton (n 13) 11. 140