     and media attention in recent times with the mass expulsion of stateless Rohingya from Myanmar and the risk of mass denationalization of Indian citizens in the state of Assam.3 But, the phenomenon of statelessness and the predicament of the stateless go beyond these more highly publicized instances. The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’) reported in their 2022 Global Trends Forced Displacement Report (‘2022 Global Trends Report’) an estimate of 4.4 million stateless persons or persons with undetermined nationality worldwide.4 When statelessness first emerged as an issue of international concern, the focus was initially on Europe,5 and for a long time it has been associated with the refugee or forced migration context.6 The 1949 United Nations ‘A Study on Statelessness’ suggested that the number of stateless persons who are not refugees ‘is limited’7 and ‘much less numerous than that of refugees who are stateless’.8 The study even suggested that the position of stateless nonrefugees ‘is in certain respects more favourable than that of stateless refugees’, as the former ‘can obtain documents establishing his civil status from the authorities of the countries where these documents were originally issued, because these authorities have no reason to refuse them to him.’9 More than sixty years on, the state of knowledge about the phenomenon of statelessness has changed tremendously. A 2014 UNHCR Handbook observed that ‘[m]ost stateless persons . . . have never crossed borders and find themselves in their “own country.”’10 Indeed, according to the UNHCR Christoph Sperfeldt and Amelia Walters, ‘A Crisis of Citizenship in India is Risking Mass Statelessness’ Pursuit (5 September 2019) <https://pursuit.unimelb.edu.au/articles/acrisis-of-citizenship-in-india-is-risking-mass-statelessness>; see Chapter 8 in this book, Mohsin Alam Bhat’s chapter, ‘Doubtful Citizens: Irregularization and Precarious Citizenship in Contemporary India’. 4 United High Commissioner for Refugees (UNCHR), ‘Global Trends: Forced Displacement in 2022’ (Report Statistics and Demographics Section June 2023) 5 <www.unhcr.org/sites/ default/files/2023-06/global-trends-report-2022.pdf> accessed 12 September 2023 (‘2022 Global Trends Report’). 5 Mira Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press 2020), 108. 6 Noting some exceptions for example, Benjamin N. Lawrence and Jacqueline Stevens (eds) Citizenship in Question: Evidentiary Birthright and Statelessness (Duke University Press 2017). 7 United Nations, ‘A Study on Statelessness’ (UN Doc E/1112;E/1112/Add.1 August 1949) 3 <www.unhcr.org/media/study-statelessness-united-nations-august-1949-lake-successnew-york> accessed 12 September 2023. 8 ibid. 9 ibid. 10 UNHCR, ‘Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons under the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons’ (Handbook 30 June 2014) para 1 <www.unhcr.org/dach/ 3 https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009399555.003 Published online by Cambridge University Press