TAKING STATELESSNESS SERIOUSLY PHILLIP COLE * My first encounter with the idea of statelessness happened when I was invited to participate in the Statelessness and Transcontinental Migration Conference at the United Nations University Institute in Barcelona in 2014. I gave a short paper on ‘The Philosophy and Politics of Membership’ which, I have to confess, did not venture very far into the landscape of statelessness. The invitation came because of my work on the ethics of international migration and on refugees and asylum, and my initial thought in accepting the invitation was that what I had to say about migration and membership would be relevant to the conference’s topic. The paper was well received, but I was troubled by the fact that, in the end, it did not address statelessness, and that, despite writing and editing a number of books and contributing chapters and articles on the ethics of international migration, I had never included statelessness in any of those discussions. Fortunately, the Barcelona conference kick-started a project with Tendayi Bloom and Katherine Tonkiss that resulted in the edited collection Understanding Statelessness published in 2017. 1 In the course of that project and writing my own chapter, ‘Insider Theory and the Construction of Statelessness’, I came to realise that I could not simply subsume the subject within the arguments I had already made regarding migration and refugees, and that statelessness was a distinct question with its own dimensions. But, at the same time, it was a question that enabled me to reflect on my work on migration, because at the heart of all that work was the problematic concept of political membership, and the issue of statelessness has, or ought to have, a fundamental impact on how we think about political membership itself. However, there are challenges in bringing the concept of statelessness into ‘mainstream’ political theory, or at least that part of political theory that examines migration and membership. Part of the problem is that discussions around the ethics of migration take place within two framing paradigms: the paradigm of voluntary movement and the paradigm of original membership. The subject of the discussion is the person who voluntarily moves across international borders and who, while perhaps (but not necessarily) seeking membership of the state they have entered, is already a member of another state. Therefore, if the new state allows them entry but refuses them membership, they have another state that recognises them; and if the new state refuses them entry altogether, they have another state where they have the right of residence — they have a political home. This allows us to structure the discussion around a series of analogies concerning rights of entry and exit, to show that it is entirely appropriate for states to refuse the right of entry, without noticing that those analogies are almost entirely beside * 1 Senior Lecturer in Politics and International Relations at the University of the West of England, Bristol. Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole, Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017).