A Typology of Statelessness
stronger discrimination in the admission process.57 In other words, Syrian and
North African refugees are denied the social recognition that is granted to
Ukrainians.
Besides immigration admission, naturalisation is another example that shows
how closely legal recognition and social recognition are intertwined. Today,
citizenship is mostly framed, not as a basic right, but a privilege that must be
earned.58 The United Kingdom’s naturalisation process is paradigmatic for this
wider praxis. It requires temporary residence for five years to be eligible for
‘probationary citizenship’, followed by ‘evidence of continuing economic
contribution and successful completion of the “Knowledge of Life in the UK” and
English language tests’ as well as another year of additional examinations.59
As with asylum, there seems to be a similar pattern of discrimination in terms
of who is granted nationality and who is not. Switzerland is an illustrative case
since, for many years, several of its municipalities have used referendums to
decide on naturalisations. Drawing on a large data set of votes from 1970 to 2003,
Jens Hainmueller and Dominik Hangarten show that the
country of origin is by far the most important determinant of naturalization success.
The average proportion voting ‘no’ in the naturalization referendums is about 13–
15 percentage points higher for applicants from (the former) Yugoslavia and
Turkey compared to observably similar applicants from richer northern and western
European countries who apply in the same municipality at the same time.60
While economic status and length of residency also have a positive, yet much
smaller, correlation, language skills and integration status do not seem to matter
at all.61 Hence, their findings also suggest that social recognition is less tied to
merits than to an essentialist image of the ‘Other’.
THREE SUBTYPES OF STATELESSNESS
A theoretical framework that focuses on the tight connection between legal and
social recognition as well as the sources of deprivation allows me to identify three
different subtypes of statelessness. The first is voluntary statelessness where (a)
the stateless individual is the source of legal non-recognition themselves and (b)
legal non-recognition and social non-recognition by the country of origin do not
necessarily coincide. The second subtype is structural statelessness where (a)
international law is the source of legal non-recognition and (b) legal nonrecognition and social non-recognition by the country of origin do not necessarily
coincide. The third subtype is denigrative statelessness where (a) the country of
57
58
59
60
61
See Kirk Bansak, Jens Hainmueller, and Dominik Hangartner, ‘How Economic,
Humanitarian, and Religious Concerns Shape European Attitudes toward Asylum Seekers’
(2016) 354(6309) Science 217, 217–22; Melissa De Witte, ‘Ukrainian Refugees Face a More
Accommodating Europe, Says Stanford Scholar’, Stanford News (online, 24 March 2022)
<https://news.stanford.edu/2022/03/24/ukrainian-refugees-face-accommodating-europesays-stanford-scholar/>, archived at <https://perma.cc/VK6H-ESB3>.
Nisha Kapoor, Deport, Deprive, Extradite: 21st Century State Extremism (Verso 2018) 104–
11; see also Margaret Somers who calls this ‘the contractualization of citizenship’: Margaret
R Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights
(Cambridge University Press 2008) 2–3.
Kapoor (n 58) 93.
Jens Hainmueller and Dominik Hangartner, ‘Who Gets a Swiss Passport? A Natural
Experiment in Immigrant Discrimination’ (2013) 107(1) American Political Science Review
159, 160.
ibid 161.
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