SOLVING STATELESSNESS will be seen in the Tanzania case, people are left vulnerable. However, it is also a strongly political issue, especially in a context in which rule of law is weak and documentation is sparse: without sufficient political buy-in, national legal status can be undermined by both legal and nonlegal measures. Finally, a vital component of whether or not someone is in practice stateless is empirical citizenship – namely the ability to be included in the specific locality in which you are living. For someone to not only be technically recognised as a citizen of a given country but to also realise the benefits of that citizenship, all three components (legal, political and local recognition of the legitimacy to belong) need to be acknowledged and addressed. The dangers of statelessness are reflected in all three areas, therefore, just as solutions – while focused primarily on legal solutions – need also to take account of the broader socio-political context. It follows, therefore, that the refugee policies of States and the international community as a whole need to be realigned to promote rather than undermine all of these aspects of national inclusion if statelessness is to be not only resolved, but also prevented. 3. Tanzania: Statelessness averted The story of a large group of Burundian refugees in Tanzania who transitioned from being refugees to having their nationality questioned (and possibly becoming stateless) to finally receiving Tanzanian citizenship, points to many of the issues at the heart of the relationship between refugees and potential or actual statelessness. It is a story in which, after four decades in exile, and just at the point at which “durable solutions” were supposedly being realised, a group of refugees found themselves without a nationality. Although the situation has now generally been resolved inasmuch as they were finally able to access Tanzanian citizenship, the process itself nearly left them stateless. This group of approximately 162,000 former refugees fled genocide in Burundi for Tanzania in the early 1970s. As part of then-President Nyerere’s pan-African vision in which African identity superseded colonially-imposed boundaries, they were allocated large areas of land given to them by the Tanzanian government under the country’s Ujamaa village system. Organised into three settlement areas, by 1985 they were considered self-sufficient and the administration of the settlements was handed over from UNHCR to the government of Tanzania. By 2007, 82% of this population had been born in 79