All Ears to the Ground constrain them. 62 The debates on agency within statelessness studies speak to broader sociological framings relating to the balance between structural constraints and individual agencies.63 Law and legal identity do not determine the parameters of our humanness, but they do define the parameters of state power which profoundly impact social relations and human experience. Based on the contention that structures are rarely absolute but are rather diffuse and dynamic, this article understands that people affected by statelessness do have agency and can resist. It also understands that the hegemonic nature of state power means that stateless peoples’ actions are restricted by quite a specific set of structural factors related to the lack of recognition of their legal status. These structural factors can severely curtail many forms of resistance and limit the effectiveness of resistance in seeking social justice. Different forms of solidarity — in this case within the anti-statelessness sector — can and do help to shift power dynamics to a greater or lesser extent. With this in mind, the following Parts on the modes of resistance highlight some of these structural limitations. Social action is sometimes conceptualised as occurring at different levels: international, national and local. Organisations that are the ‘targets’ of advocacy or activism campaigns operate on and across these levels: international (eg, Inter-governmental organisations, United Nations (‘UN’) bodies,64 regional blocs, international lending and development institutions, etc); national (eg, state and state-funded organisations); and local (eg, local authorities). Likewise, promotors of social change are sometimes differentiated into levels: international civil society (International non-governmental organisations (‘INGOs’), public-private partnerships, think-tanks, etc), national civil society (National NGOs, privatepublic partnerships, think tanks, etc) and local level (community-based organisations, grassroots activists, etc). Social action is, however, perhaps better understood as a series of fluid and dynamic connections between different levels, organisations and individuals. Nonetheless, in order to understand the shifting structures of power, it is useful to draw on these units or levels. In this article, international and national level advocacy as conducted by INGOs, NGOs and other actors is conceived as separate, but connected to the forms of resistance from below that are outlined in Part IIIB. There has always been movement and overlap between the levels. For example, activists from stateless communities in diaspora or formerly stateless activists often operate at multiple levels from local to international, while some partnerships between INGOs, national NGOs and stateless-led organisations have developed ways of collaborating and priority setting that operate on multiple levels.65 The increasing 62 63 64 65 Samanwita Paul and Balbir Singh Butola, ‘Rohingya Women as Refugees: Examining Displacement, Refugeehood and “Bare Life”’ (2024) 37(3) Journal of Refugee Studies 680; Brad K Blitz, ‘The State and the Stateless: The legacy of Hannah Arendt Reconsidered’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge, 1st ed, 2017) 70. Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society: Outline of the Theory of Structuration (Polity Press 1984); On contexts shaped by bureaucracy, see Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Cornell University Press 2000). United Nations agencies and bodies are often simultaneously involved in advocacy and the targets of advocacy. See, eg, ENS, External Community (n 5); Global Statelessness Fund (n 5); ‘Meet our Members’, Global Alliance to End Statelessness (Web Page, 2025) <https://statelessnessalliance.org/members-directory/>, archived at <perma.cc/Y75A-ZDVZ> (‘Statelessness Alliance’). 17