THE ARRIVAL OF ‘STATELESSNESS STUDIES’? DAVID BALUARTE * In my symposium contribution, I provide my view that the study of statelessness has emerged as a multi-disciplinary field and urge that we institutionalise it as such. Statelessness is fundamentally a legal concept. The definition of ‘stateless person’ specifically refers to the operation of law, and the protections envisioned by both the 1954 and 1961 Conventions afforded to stateless persons are legal in nature. 1 At the same time, formal legal reasoning has proven inadequate to fully understand statelessness and protect stateless persons. Moreover, factual statelessness enjoys few legal protections, but is essential to a more robust understanding of nationality and what its absence really means. Accordingly, the study of this legal concept should happen across disciplines to ensure that we take appropriate steps to integrate effectively stateless persons legally, politically, and socially, in the communities where they live. The most important indicator that the field of statelessness studies has emerged is the abundance of scholarly work on this topic that both fascinates and vexes the global community. Once conceived as a technical problem of harmonising state nationality laws, 2 statelessness gained a humanitarian dimension after World War II. 3 Large-scale statelessness, which occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Former Yugoslavia, brought its relationship to geo-politics into focus. Due to the hardening of both national borders and rhetoric about national identity in response to a recent increase in global forced migration, people who fall outside of the world order of nation states face risks as pressing as they have at any point in contemporary history. In 2014, Mark Manly and Laura Van Waas observed that ‘there is enough [scholarly] activity to conclude that statelessness has “arrived” as a recognized focus of both academic and policy-oriented study’. 4 The precipitous rise in scholarly work with practical and theoretical applications even since that 2014 declaration clearly marks the emergence of statelessness studies as a field. * 1 2 3 4 David Baluarte is an Associate Clinical Professor of Law at the Washington and Lee University School of Law, where he directs the Immigrant Rights Clinic. Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September 1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960); Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, opened for signature 30 August 1961, 989 UNTS 175 (entered into force 13 December 1975). Peter J Spiro, ‘Citizenship, Nationality, and Statelessness’ in Vincent Chetail and Celine Bauloz (eds), Research Handbook on International Law and Migration (Edward Elgar 2014) 283. Guy S Goodwin-Gill, ‘Introductory Note to the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons’ (2010) United Nations Audiovisual Library 1. Mark Manly and Laura Van Waas, ‘The State of Statelessness Research: A Human Rights Imperative’ (2014) 19(1–2) Tilburg Law Review 3, 4.