random. It is actively produced and maintained (Kingston, 2017). Particular groups are excluded and, as I argue through the following cases, those exclusions are often closely linked to patterns of migration and governance. ‘Statelessness’ entails far more than simply not being ‘considered a national of any State’, or ‘lacking citizenship everywhere’, as it is often defined (UNHCR, 2014b; UNHCR, 2017; Staples, 2012). Statelessness is a legal and embodied space. It has significant ramifications on an individual’s access to political, social, and occupational rights, and to state-provided services such as education and healthcare (Acciaioli et al., 2017; Ahsan Ullah, 2016; Allerton, 2017; Bloom et al., 2017; Parsons and Lawreniuk, 2018; Staples, 2012; Weis, 1961; Weissbrodt and Collins, 2006; UNHCR, 2014a). Statelessness has enormous impacts on mobility, both horizontal (ie. moving across geographic space) and vertical (ie. ‘social’ mobility). It precludes access to ‘regular’ travel across borders and can limit movement within borders. Its effects are experienced on a day-to-day basis, and as mentioned earlier, it is also often a precursor of further oppression: the ongoing genocide of the Rohingya in Myanmar is just one example, and ethnic cleansings and forced displacements of stateless groups continue to occur around the world (UNHCR, 2014a). Statelessness always entails an absence of citizenship, often a positively produced structural exclusion (Kingston, 2017). Until relatively recently, the production of statelessness was largely unresearched in most academic and policy circles (Kingston, 2013; Waas, 2008). A brief history of statelessness theory will prove enlightening. There have been three major periods of thought. First was the post-WWII moment, when statelessness was largely thought of as an exception to the rule of modern (European) citizenship and nationality. Hannah Arendt is the major author of the period, with her famous work on ‘the right to have rights’, which implied that the nation is the arbiter of rights and that, therefore, a person without a nation is a person without rights (see, e.g., Arendt, 1958; Zweig, 1964; Weis, 1961; Weis, 1962). A change in theory occurred in the post-Cold War moment and around the turn of the millenium, as the collapses of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia led to a significant rise in denationalized stateless populations. A new discourse around statelessness began to emerge, viewing it as more pervasive than just an ‘exception’, and as an embodied legal space with repercussions on daily life—sometimes with reference to Agamben’s notion of ‘bare life’ (see, e.g., Agamben, 1998; Staples, 2012; Blitz and Lynch, 2011; Gibney, 2013; Kingston, 2013). Most recently, a new turn in statelessness theory is emerging which views the phenomenon as “endemic rather than exceptional…arising from the very structure of the international State system”, rather than as a problem that can be solved by the existing system (Bloom et al., 2017: 5). This new turn has further increased the focus on statelessness as actively produced, which this paper provides evidence to.     17