BOOK REVIEW STATELESSNESS AND CONTEMPORARY ENSLAVEMENT BY JANE ANNA GORDON (ROUTLEDGE 2019). 164 PAGES. PRICE USD $34.36. ISBN 9780367358549 YURIKO COWPER-SMITH * Although having gained a footing in international law, statelessness research is slowly developing into a cross-disciplinary area of scholarship and connections to other legal and human rights issues are becoming more and more apparent. 1 As one such overlapping topic, Jane Anna Gordon’s new book Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement looks at how statelessness and enslavement are related. 2 On the surface, they may seem like discrete and disparate phenomena, unfortunate anomalies in a world that is moving towards progress and modernity. However, as we will learn, they are much more closely associated than one may initially think. Gordon’s aim is to delve directly into this thorny intersection. Her ambitious book explains how these two forms of extreme vulnerability and exclusion — statelessness and enslavement — are neither anomalies nor exceptions. They are deliberate processes and outcomes that were (and still are) embedded in the ways in which the international state system and global economic model of capitalism were developed and are maintained today. Rather than viewing statelessness as an isolated legal issue or enslavement solely as a human rights issue, Gordon studies statelessness and enslavement together because they tell us about the political processes that lead to both conditions. To Gordon, the forces that generate statelessness are the ones that also cause people to be at risk of slavery. So, what exactly are these political processes? Towards the end of the book, Gordon asks how the ‘vulnerability generated by contemporary political economic conditions [became] opportunities for highly lucrative profit-making’? 3 For her, the extraction of labour from vulnerable others, whose exploitation is normalised and made invisible, is reflective of our deeply unequal and precarity-generating systems of economic and political governance. In her view, these forces, which cause the dilution or the degradation of citizenship — that is evidently taking place — is key to understanding how we end up with statelessness and enslavement in the present. Gordon does not exclusively study statelessness and enslavement to understand how we got to where we are today. She also argues that there is value in understanding the production of statelessness and enslavement because, through their understanding, we can begin to discuss how to make our political institutions more sustainable and equitable. She astutely asks: * 1 2 3 Dr Yuriko Cowper-Smith holds a PhD in Political Science from the University of Guelph. She researches diaspora-led social movements, forced migration, statelessness and genocide. Maria Recalde-Vela, Sangita Jaghai and Caia Vlieks, ‘The State of Statelessness Research: 5 Years Later’ (2019) 24(2) Tilburg Law Review: Journal on International and Comparative Law, 139–41. Jane Anna Gordon, Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement (Routledge 2019). ibid 103.