2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(1) political membership as occupying a spectrum — with full membership of a powerful Western State, on the one hand, and statelessness, on the other — in this mode, all groups, even the enfranchised, become marked by degrees of statelessness through which the concrete value of political membership is eroded. However flawed and embattled, citizenship in states, while influenced by relations determined and enshrined by the market, was not simply to duplicate them. There was a sense that a nation worth its muster did not allow tragedies that could be averted to befall its own, even if ‘tragedies’ and ‘its own’ could prove quite elastic. Even more humble citizens, through political inclusion, had, through a passport, access to a world beyond their immediate borders; a right to rights that loaned institutional and national power that far exceeded their own personal domestic social location. What is vital about the widespread retreat from models of citizenship that sought to give concrete, material value to political belonging is that it also encouraged the neglecting of alternatives to existing States and discouraged attention to and support for the growth of other forms of institution that do and can more effectively nurture distinctively political forms of membership. In their absence, the only state to which many citizens belong does not seem to offer much. Considering these modes of creating stateless people together illustrates that, like enslavement, statelessness is not a radical exception. Instead, both phenomena are two discrete but predictable outcomes of similar processes of the racialised debasement of citizenship. Few lamentable circumstances have not befallen communities facing protracted statelessness. Among the lamentable circumstances is literal enslavement. And for members of ethnic and racial communities long enslaved, the conditions that follow their legal emancipation can often be compared with that of the stateless since the government of the states where they reside frequently refuse to treat them as belonging, and there is no other political unit they might claim as their own. 158