Gender Discrimination in Nepal and How Statelessness Hampers Identity Formation Susann Nowack Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2015/02 Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion December 2015 Author biography Susann Nowack is a MS graduate of Violence, Conflict and Development at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. She currently works for the European Commission. Moreover, as a consultant she supported United Nations agencies, including UNDP, and NGOs like Collective Campaign for Peace (COCAP) in Nepal. She is a project committee member of the Peace Brigades International initiative NepalMonitor.org and her research focuses on war to peace transition, statelessness and mediation in violent conflicts. Author email susann.nowack@gmail.com Keywords statelessness – citizenship – identity – girls and women – discrimination – Constituent Assembly – trafficking Abstract The paper argues that the effect of holding a citizenship expands beyond a formal individual-staterelation. The paper illustrates that statelessness impacts the identity formation of affected persons through several internal and external factors. Thereby, this article focuses from one angle on women who are denied the ability to pass their citizenship on to their children without the support of their husbands or other male relatives; and from another angle it talks about girls and women who are rendered stateless as a result of discrimination. This article explores how far the discriminated girls and women suffer from a conditioned private (for example within their families) and public sphere (within the community), in which they are limited in their capacity to act and to form their identity. This paper argues that a long-term shift of a deeply rooted patriarchal mind-set and thus cultural assumptions as well as institutional practice is needed to allow the affected girls and women to discover their full social, political and economic capacities and hence, to pro-actively contribute to the two spheres.