50 By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies
‘rediscovery’ of statelessness (Blitz and Lynch 2011; Edwards and Waas
2014). The re-emergence of the issue was generally understood to have been
driven by key personalities within UNHCR who advocated for the issue to
be prioritised.25 Between 2011 and 2015, there were 49 accessions to the
two Statelessness Conventions (UNHCR). In 2014, UNHCR launched the ‘I
Belong campaign’ which aimed to bring different agencies and civil society
organisation together to eradicate statelessness by 2024.26 The prominence
of statelessness as an international issue, then, had increased internationally,
driven predominantly by priorities set within UNHCR. The rediscovery of
statelessness has led to both increasingly amorphous meanings attributed to
statelessness and an increasingly coordinated and formalised global approach
to its occurrence.27 The issue of statelessness was reasserted internationally
as a fundamental human rights issue—expanding beyond the 1990s focus
on state succession and legal technical solutions addressing gaps between
nationality laws (Spiro 2011; Foster and Lambert 2016). This time the scope
of the problem was defined more broadly, re-establishing the significance of
discrimination in nationality laws and their application (UNHCR 2014:Actions 3&4). The resultant international approach was more comprehensive.
UNHCR’s 10-point Global Action Plan (2014–24) that accompanied the
I Belong campaign recommended ‘one or two’ of a large scope of measures,
depending on the country context (UNHCR). These measures ranged from
directly tackling discrimination in citizenship laws and civil registration procedures (Action 3&4), to a softer focus on the administrative procedures relating to birth registration (Action 7), provision of documents to those entitled
to citizenship (Action 8), and expanding access to naturalisation procedures
to enable stateless persons to regularise their legal status over time (Action
6) (UNHCR 2014). Meanwhile, the global campaign frequently drew on the
language that equated statelessness with invisibility. The public-facing campaigns attempted to address discrimination by making the issue more visible
to the general public and thus shifting domestic and international opinions.
Whilst the action plan recommended tackling discrimination in registration
processes and laws, the problem of statelessness was simultaneously reinforced in public campaigns as a problem of invisibility to state bureaucracies
and thus a matter of state oversight. Despite the relatively broad scope of
the action plan’s approaches, UNHCR’s and other UN agencies’ pragmatic
need to continue to engage with states on statelessness and their broader
mandates, and the relative power of states vis-à-vis international organisations, established a tendency to veer towards the softer approaches on which
international agencies could engage with states. Other international agencies
followed the same trajectory.28
Rohingya statelessness was largely approached from within the same paradigms. In selecting the ‘one or two’ measures under the Global Action Plan,
the softer approaches were pragmatically chosen by UN agencies in order to
engage with Myanmar. This was broadly in line with other approaches to