Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2015/04
1. Introduction
Theorists who have addressed the discourse surrounding citizenship since World War II have argued
that the globalisation of universal human rights has advanced the meaning of citizenship to transcend
the nation state. Furthermore, the ability to make claims to, and access rights in, contemporary
Western states is said to be based on personhood rather than nationality.1 However, for stateless
populations—those who do not have a legal bond with a state—attempts to make claims to human
rights are often achieved only through the work of advocacy organisations who speak on their behalf.
Therefore, it is often assumed that the stateless are voiceless as they cannot speak for or represent
themselves. Furthermore, statelessness research is usually characterised by an urgency to act quickly
and find a solution with little time and resources, whether that is because populations are stranded
at sea whilst governments decide between them who will be responsible for hosting them,2 or because
state succession leaves a population stateless.3 In their haste to act, advocates may miss the subtle
creation of new sites and scales where the stateless can enact themselves as citizens of their own
making, a process which can be interpreted as acts of citizenship.4
Acts of Citizenship are a way of thinking about citizenship beyond membership5 of a state, and
conceptualising articulations of resistance made by groups and individuals who are marginalised from
official claim-making processes. Documenting how individuals and groups seek to “change citizenship
from below”,6 by carving out their own processes of habitation and subsistence that exist alongside,
outside of, and across the constraints of government policies and practices, exercising what Soguk7
has called “the capacity for agency against all odds”,8 provides an insight into the creative ways in
which people disrupt and momentarily subvert their marginal statuses. These enactments take a
different form to social actions which are already instituted and associated with scripted behaviours
of citizenship, acts such as voting and taxpaying.9 Conversely, acts of citizenship shifts our attention
away from asking “who is a citizen” to “what makes a citizen”.10
The question this paper raises is whether ethnic Vietnamese children who have undetermined
nationality can enact themselves as citizens, and if so, how? In short, I will argue that the children in
Preah Thnov can, although the enactment of citizenship I observed through fieldwork may not
immediately secure ethnic Vietnamese children the durable solution of a formal ‘legal’ bond of
nationality as citizens. Nevertheless, the acts of citizenship I documented could in the future lead to
further acts of successful claim making.
1
D Jacobson, Rights across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (The Johns Hopkins University Press 1996);
YN Soysal, Limits of Citizenship: Migrants and Postnational Membership in Europe (The University of Chicago Press 1994); S
Benhabib, The Rights of Others: Aliens; Residents and Citizens (Cambridge University Press 2004).
2 Such was the plight of the Rohingya in May 2015. BBC, ‘Why Are so Many Rohingya Migrants Stranded at Sea?’ (2015)
<http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-32740637> accessed 3 September 2015.
3 K Southwick, ‘Ethiopia-Eritrea: Statelessness and State Succession’ [2009] Forced Migration Review 15.
4 E Isin & G Nielsen, Acts of Citizenship (Zed Books 2008).
5 Throughout this paper membership of state will have a synonymous meaning with citizenship as nationality.
6 EF Isin & P Nyers, Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies (Routledge 2014).
7 N Soguk, States and Strangers: Refugees and Displacements of Statecraft (University of Minnesota Press 1999).
8 PA Palmgren, ‘Irregular Networks: Bangkok Refugees in the City and Region’ (2013) 27 Journal of Refugee Studies 21.
9 EF Isin, ‘Citizenship in Flux: The Figure of the Activist Citizen’ [2009] Subjectivity 367.
10 ibid.
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