3. ENSURING THAT TODAY’S REFUGEES ARE NOT TOMORROW’S STATELESS: SOLUTIONS IN A REFUGEE CONTEXT to access travel documents (in particular if they are unable to access protection from the only State that they have ever known). Indeed, it may be awkward to even speak about “return” in the case of individuals who, though considered to be “refugees” may have been born and lived their entire lives in the host country. Such individuals may find it hard to access rights in the country of their supposed nationality, because they are unable to speak the national language or because they are unable to assert belonging at the local level, critical to accessing land and other resources. Indeed, in the case of Rwanda and the tripartite agreement with the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the very right to repatriate under facilitated return itself was in question for those who were seen as not legitimately Congolese. However, it is certainly clear that if appropriate preventative action is not taken to resolve prolonged exile, over time tens of thousands of former refugees are likely to become stateless. Furthermore, it is important to note that this challenge is not unique to the Great Lakes region. For instance, former Cambodian refugees in Vietnam who did not return to Cambodia following cessation of their refugee status and lost their ties to Cambodia, such that they were recognised as being stateless, were eventually granted facilitated naturalisation in Vietnam. Many (former) refugees from Liberia are currently stranded in exile because they have not been able to secure recognition and re-documentation of their Liberian nationality; and refugees in, for instance, Europe and the United States of America from the former Soviet Union who missed out on citizenship because they were in exile at the time of dissolution therefore may have failed to qualify for or secure nationality of one of the successor States. As these multiple examples demonstrate, a stronger emphasis on local integration and political will by host States in this regard, up to and including de jure naturalisation, may be an important way of both preventing and solving statelessness. This chapter looks at three case studies in order to explore the complex interaction between the problems of forced displacement and statelessness. Common throughout the cases are a number of key components that revolve around the challenges of statelessness. First, statelessness is a legal issue. Despite the shaky political ground on which notions of national belonging often rest in the Great Lakes region, citizenship at the national level remains a crucial form of protection and access to resources. Without formal legal recognition of status, as 78