International Journal of Refugee Law, 2026, Vol. 00, Issue 00 • 23 6. Conclusion There is no funding source to declare. Funding Conflict of interest There are no conflicts of interest to declare. © The Author(s) (2026). Published by Oxford University Press. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial reproduction and distribution of the work, in any medium, provided the original work is not altered or transformed in any way, and that the work is properly cited. For commercial re-use, please contact reprints@oup.com for reprints and translation rights for reprints. All other permissions can be obtained through our RightsLink service via the Permissions link on the article page on our site—for further information please contact journals.permissions@oup.com. International Journal of Refugee Law 2026 00(00) 1–23 https://doi.org/10.1093/ijrl/eeag028 Article Downloaded from academic.oup.com/ijrl/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ijrl/eeag028/8767365 by guest on 08 October 2026 This article has explored the UAE’s adoption of a bilateral agreement with the Comoros in an attempt to address the statelessness of its bidun population. It has assessed the legality of this arrangement, concluding that the agreement was contrary to the UAE’s treaty obligations arising under the CRC to provide stateless people born in its territory a nationality, as well as its obligations under ICERD and customary international law to avoid depriving the bidun of nationality on discriminatory and arbitrary grounds. I have argued that it is not the case that any nationality can be supplied in satisfaction of states’ obligations in respect of nationality, but rather the nationality to which a person is most closely connected. For in situ stateless populations, this is the nationality of the country in which they are residing. Moreover, this article has argued that the grant of Comorian passports to the bidun of the UAE did not amount to the grant of Comorian nationality, because what was granted did not satisfy either the external or internal dimensions of the quality or substance of nationality. This article has compared this agreement adopted by the UAE, and a similar agreement contemplated by Kuwait, with bilateral agreements adopted in response to the phenomenon of asylum seeking and irregular migration. In both contexts, bilateral agreements target populations deemed undesirable by the state, exploit perceived ambiguity in legal obligations and a lack of accountability, and are concluded between States with unequal economic power and at high cost. Due to these similarities, I have argued it is appropriate to frame the UAE’s agreement with Comoros as an externalization agreement, or an attempt to outsource protection. This framing not only offers a way of understanding and contextualizing an otherwise extraordinary arrangement; it also offers important lessons. Firstly, there is a real risk of policy spread of bilateral statelessness agreements among States, as many States grapple with the problem of long-term in situ statelessness. Secondly, placing these two contexts side by side highlights a growing deterritorialization and commodification of protection. This is taking place through the gradual erosion of the link between territorial presence and States’ obligations owed towards stateless people, asylum seekers, and irregular migrants. This deterritorialization is, in turn, enabling the commodification of citizenship and of asylum, and leading to a troubling shift from a protection-based to a market-based response to the phenomenon of statelessness, asylum seeking, and irregular migration.