Regional Report on Citizenship: The Middle East and North Africa (MENA) legitimate etc38 – alongside other endemic problems, such as sexual violence which has led to children being born in precarious situations without legal links to their often unknown fathers.39 Syria provides a clear and worrying example of how these conflicts and huge displacements, coupled with discriminatory laws and procedures, are leading to nationality issues. Two relevant problems concern the discriminatory nationality laws and access to civil registration. For the former, mass displacement creates situations in which it often cannot be established who the father of a child is, i.e. the marriage may never have been registered or the documents were lost, the fathers are unknown or their whereabouts are unknown, etc. Where there is no legal or physical proof as to who a child’s father is, the child may have no nationality, as a Syrian mother cannot her nationality to her child. Additionally, various factors impede access to birth registration in host countries as well as in Syria – often due to procedural complications and costs – therefore many children are being born with no proof as to where they were born or who their parents are, the two factors on the basis of which they might be able to access nationality in the future.40 2.6. Conclusion The above analysis is not an exhaustive account of what has shaped nationality legislation and policy in the Middle East and North Africa. However, it highlights some of the most significant developments in the last century that have affected this area of law and state-building. To start with, after the colonial carving-up of the region, newly independent states struggled to define their national identity and with it to determine who are their nationals. There have been several impactful events in the region that have prompted states to reconsider their approach to the regulation of nationality and these have led to its instrumentalisation in some contexts. The establishment of Israel and displacement of Palestinians, the temporary flirtation with a panArabic ideology and the recent turmoil that has engulfed the region have all had their bearing on how those in power have defined who is in and who is out. The overall picture is of a region with significantly flawed nationality laws, where reactionary practices have regularly placed the nationality of undesirable groups under threat. 38 For more discussion on some of the issues regarding civil registration and documentation procedures in non-state controlled areas of Syria for example see IRC, Identify Me: The Documentation Crisis in Northern Syria, 2016, access at https://www.rescue-uk.org/report/identify-me-documentation-crisis-northern-syria 39 See Lees, S, Born of the Islamic State, Addressing Discrimination in Nationality Provisions through a Rule of Law Framework, ISI Working Paper Series, 2016.08 access at http://www.institutesi.org/WP2016_08.pdf 40 For an in-depth look at the nationality issues arising because of the Syrian conflict see ISI, NRC, Understanding Statelessness in the Syria Refugee Context, 2016, access at http://www.syrianationality.org/pdf/report.pdf RSCAS/GLOBALCIT-Comp. 2017/3- © 2017 Author(s) 9