Critical Allies situation of Syrian refugees. 13 In other words, they think of those pushed outside the states where they had resided with nowhere to go. While no one would not decry such circumstances, they resonate differently for those for whom states have been primarily colonial or predatory. The mobilised responses seem not to raise questions about the nature and desirability of existing states. Similarly, they do not ask about people who are displaced in place — those who were made stateless but who have never crossed a border 14 or about those who have technical legal standing but who appear, in their political situation, to resemble the stateless more than they do fellow citizens. 15 In an effort to connect without conflating the distinctive forms that statelessness has taken, I therefore argue for thinking of it as having at least three primary modes. 16 In one, semi-autonomous groupings or nations are forcefully incorporated into centralising, homogenising states. They become in their own view, and in many cases remain, nations without states, even when they possess formal citizenship in rich, industrialised countries. 17 As Vine Deloria Jr observed, this process was duplicated as Euromodern states consolidated themselves through imperial endeavour. 18 As in earlier iterations of this mode, settler colonial states only interacted with existing governing structures they encountered as was necessary, denying their distinct legitimate and international standing. Depending on exigent political needs, as they sought to absorb these previously autonomous territories into themselves, they sometimes withheld membership and, in other moments, forcibly incorporated people as individuals separate from the nations through which they understood themselves. In the second, familiar mode, people are pushed outside of the only political home they know and into a world carved up into states each of which claims monopoly to determine its terms of entry and exclusion. In most such cases, the stateless, who are disproportionately racial, ethnic and colonised minorities facing state repression, are made into non-citizens by the country of their birth. Neither beginning nor ending in the mid-twentieth century, this mode of generating stateless people is also evident in the many cases of relegating people to legal elsewheres or to spaces within states where it is accepted that a patterned, divergent set of rules apply. This has been evident in the United States in plantation slavery, Japanese internment, legalised residential segregation, and particular dimensions of mass incarceration independent of and for deportation. In the third mode, the very category of citizenship and expectations linked to it are so significantly diminished that, if one previously could roughly envision 13 14 15 16 17 18 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September 1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960). For rich discussion of this phenomenon see Kristy Belton, Statelessness in the Caribbean: The Paradox of Belonging in a Postnational World (University of Pennsylvania Press 2017). For more on this point, see Jane Anna Gordon, Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement (Routledge 2020); Margaret Somers, Genealogies of Citizenship: Markets, Statelessness, and the Right to Have Rights (Cambridge University Press 2008). There are, in addition, forms of statelessness produced by legal or administrative ‘gaps’. In some cases, these arise due to unforeseen circumstances, but they can also result from failures of international coordination. At the same time, while there are instances when statelessness does not occur by deliberate political design, in the vast majority of cases, the stateless are made into non-citizens in and by the country of their birth. On this point, see James Minahan (ed), Nations without States: A Historical Dictionary of Contemporary National Movements (Greenwood Press 1995). See Vine Deloria Jr, Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (University of Oklahoma Press 1969). 157