Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement once states emerge as the primary political unit through which one would seek expanded freedom or redress, where, what, and to whom does one turn when they have the opposite effect? Through what processes will these teeming numbers of people forge and secure the political institutions they need? 4 Indeed, unpacking statelessness and enslavement in parallel provokes certain core questions. As Gordon points out, ‘if the stateless magnify territorial questions of organized belonging, the enslaved demand consideration of contributions of labor as a basis for political standing’. 5 According to her, ‘contemporary enslavement and statelessness remain uniquely valuable for thinking clearly about the aims of political life, including how we might conceive the relationship between laboring and public standing or belonging’. 6 This ambitious book thus piques the reader’s interest immediately in the introduction. Gordon argues that revisiting the fundamental concepts of consent and the state are integral to understanding how we can shape our future for the better. 7 Right from the start, it is intriguing for the reader to think about how a reconceptualisation and reinvigoration of consent and the state could offer us new tools to engage with the very material problems that statelessness and enslavement present. How will theoretical debates around belonging, citizenship, consent, freedom and states help us sort out the substantial problems that we have on the ground? Gordon’s book, although grounded in political theory, is interdisciplinary and is useful for scholars and researchers who are broadly interested in statelessness and enslavement, but also belonging, citizenship, consent, freedom and the state. Her examples are global and span history. A brief summary — without giving away too much — will show the reader the significance of this new book. In chapter one, Gordon explains how states and statelessness were created together. She identifies three modes of statelessness: by forceful incorporation into a state, by being pushed out of a state and when the concrete value of political membership is eroded. She outlines how statelessness can be both deliberate and unintentional, and that sometimes legal remedies do nothing to cure the lived realities of statelessness of marginalised and oppressed groups. 8 She writes that even if statelessness were to be bureaucratically and legally overcome, ‘the ability to mobilize the rights thereby promised continues to require ongoing struggle against the very forms of discrimination that initially created obstacles to membership’. 9 These forms of discrimination are structural and very powerful. In this third mode, even people with full enfranchisement can become ‘marked by degrees of statelessness’ in some circumstances. 10 There is a connection here to the aggressive political economic norms that strip citizenship down to a bare minimum, rendering it effectively useless and meaningless. These aggressive political economic norms are revisited in the next chapter on enslavement. In Chapter Two, Gordon starts off with two compelling questions: What do practices of enslavement look like in a time where talk of democratic norms is so widespread? How is it that societies that would never proudly claim to 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 ibid 128. ibid 126. ibid 130. ibid 132. ibid 4. ibid 5. ibid 2. 355