The Banality of Statelessness and The Impossibility of Counting the Dispossessed Nergis Canefe, SJD, PhD York University, Toronto, Canada Death gives us the minor key. Henry Purcell Introduction Starting with the events of the Arab Spring leading to the dispossession of millions of Syrians, questions of dispossession, exile and statelessness have become regular agenda items in the study of not just the MENA region but at a global scale. The most recent addition to the long tally of dispossession gone wrong is that of the Afghan stateless (Canefe 2022). In response, and no irony intended here, exclusionary forms of political membership have become reinvented and reinvigorated, partly in relation to new waves of ethno-nationalism and partly due to the spread of temporary labour regimes and the incessant need for novel versions of precarious work. In addition, ingenious forms of status/non-status binar have been operationalized, juridifying temporary permanence, which in turn intently limit participation and inclusion. The stateless peoples of the Middle East, Near East, South East Asia, North Africa and South America have been particularly affected by these strategies of covert exclusion as they continue to face en masse dispossessions. In other words, contemporary statelessness is neither time-bound nor geographically distinct in origin. Hence is the impossibility of addressing it from within the international refugee regime. As Bupinder Chimni declared almost two decades ago, the focus on returnee aid [in whichever form it ma take] to facilitate en masse repatriation as a solution to en masse dispossession remains the cherished ideal of the international refugee regime (Chimni 2014).1 As such, it is understood that there is really no need to count the statelessness as ultimately, it is considered to be a transitional position. According to Chimni, the durable solutions rhetoric must be anal ed in a staggered fashion: the period between 1945 and 1985 marking resettlement and repatriation as the optimal solution 1 1