Part I. Introduction and Context a nationality, stateless people are deprived of a right to vote and more generally of a status that is essential and indispensable because of the civil rights that are attached to it. This question of participatory rights attached to nationality more generally also comes back in this research, in particular where a closer look is taken at the EU and in the reflections in Part III. A final note on the concept of ‘statelessness’ concerns terminology used in this research. First of all, it should be acknowledged that ‘statelessness’ or ‘stateless person’ as a legal label may be useful from a legal perspective, but may equally be very problematic in specific situations. Indeed, some people who are usually ‘labelled’ as stateless, reject this label: “Some Rohingya have argued that the term ‘stateless’ influenced popular discourses that negatively impacted their identity claims, had very little strategic value in terms of social action or claiming rights, and profoundly impacted international policy discussions about repatriations and their possible futures in Myanmar. In rejecting the label, participants demand that the international human rights community recognise the arbitrary deprivation of their citizenship as an extreme violation of their rights for which the state is culpable. Further, the label of ‘stateless’ in the countries with the largest Rohingya populations is yet to be endowed with access to protections, rights, and services.”38 This shows how the label ‘statelessness’ may not always lead to rights and may even have an adverse effect on a population claiming their rights (as citizens) in a country. In legal research, nonetheless, it is common to refer to those affected by it as ‘stateless persons’ – following one of the key legal instruments on the matter, the 1954 Convention on the Status of Stateless Persons (emphasis added). Th is research certainly is a legal study of statelessness and therefore the choice of using ‘stateless persons’ throughout would seem straightforward. However, this research does also look ‘outside’ of the legal sphere, by considering the context and history of norms for instance, and the author would also hope that it can be used beyond the legal discipline and can be part of a progressive and multidisciplinary field of statelessness research. Moreover, this study wants to recognize the very real people that hide behind legal conceptions and norms. Where possible, those who are affected are therefore referred to as ‘stateless people’, while recognizing that the label as such may be problematic in some circumstances, but also aware that there is no real alternative that can be used in a study like this that is of a legal nature and does not focus on one community exclusively. Only where necessary, for instance because it concerns strict legal terminology, ‘stateless persons’ is retained. 38 14 Natalie Brinham, ‘“We Are Not Stateless! You Can Call Us What You Like, But We Are Citizens of Myanmar!”: Rohingya resistance and the Stateless Label’ in Tendayi Bloom & Lindsey N Kingston (eds), Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester University Press 2021) 339–352, 348. Intersentia