Taking Statelessness Seriously residence and membership, but the paradigm of original membership remains. But another paradigm also operates here — the paradigm of forced displacement, as opposed to voluntary movement: the refugee is someone who has been forced to leave their original state because of persecution. While it may seem obvious that the stateless do not fit into the first two paradigms of original membership and voluntary movement, it is the fact that they do not fit into the third paradigm of forced displacement that is perhaps the most important feature. The temptation is to think that, while the stateless are not included within the political theory of voluntary migration, they must be covered by the political theory of forced displacement, and so our extensive discussions of refugees and issues of asylum and protection need only be tweaked here and there to include them. This, I suspect, was my frame of mind as I prepared for the Barcelona conference. However, it does not take long to realise that statelessness is a distinct issue from forced displacement in that many of the most problematic case studies of the former have nothing to do with the latter. The most dramatic example is, of course, the Rohingya of Myanmar. While vast numbers of the Rohingya have been forcibly displaced from Myanmar, 4 their statelessness was not caused by that forced displacement — it pre-dated it and indeed we might consider the causality to be the other way round to some extent. 5 A case study I discussed with my students was that of the ‘Hill Tamils’ of Sri Lanka, a population of around 168 000 people rendered stateless when Ceylon became independent in 1948. 6 The new citizenship laws required that those born before independence prove that two generations of their families were born within the territory, plus a period of 10years uninterrupted residence accompanied by an income requirement — laws specifically designed to target the Hill Tamils amongst others. 7 Another example is the Karana in Madagascar, with a population of around 20 000, present for more than a century, but with a significant portion of stateless persons. 8 The Karana were not given citizenship on independence in 1960 because they were not considered to be ethnically Malagasy, and attempts by individuals to obtain citizenship were generally unsuccessful. 9 There are similar examples of the Makonde and the Pemba in Kenya, of people in a condition of statelessness within the state they were born in and their parents were born in — their statelessness is not caused by forced displacement, and has only a tenuous connection with migration. 10 4 United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, ‘Rohingya Refugee Crisis’ (March 2019) <https://www.unocha.org/rohingya-refugee-crisis>. 5 Amal de Chickera, ‘Statelessness and Identity in the Rohingya Refugee Crisis’ Humanitarian Practice Network (October 2018) <https://odihpn.org/magazine/statelessness-identityrohingya-refugee-crisis/>. 6 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Good Practices Paper — Action 1: Resolving Existing Major Situations of Statelessness (Good Practice Paper, 23 February 2015) <http://www.refworld.org/docid/54e75a244.html>. 7 For a discussion of the Hill Tamils, see United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Resolving Existing Major Situations of Statelessness (Good Practice Paper, 2014) <www.refworld.org/pdfid/54e75a244.pdf.>. 8 United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, ‘This Is Our Home’ — Stateless Minorities and Their Search for Citizenship (Report, November 2017, <www.unhcr.org/ibelong/stateless-minorities/>. 9 ibid. 10 See generally ibid. 163