2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(1) disciplines; some are majors in the international human rights program that I direct at Webster University, but far more are taking an introductory human rights course to fulfil a general education requirement toward graduation. As we start the semester and explore the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (‘UDHR’), they are initially interested in rights and issues they are familiar with and perhaps already outraged by: discrimination against LGBTQI and racial minority groups, human trafficking, child soldiering, denied access to healthcare and education. As we connect the fundamental rights outlined in the UDHR with our own lives  including what we see as necessities to live a life of dignity  rarely does anyone think to include citizenship, passports or other forms of identity cards on our list of basic needs. Recently, as the plight of the Rohingya has emerged within the mainstream media following widespread violence and forced displacement beginning in August 2017, 3 the word ‘stateless’ might come up as an afterthought in their discussions of refugees and genocide. (Although most students, at first glance, believe that this statelessness means that the Rohingya do not have their own country  not that they are denied citizenship by Myanmar’s discriminatory nationality law). 4 Yet rarely do I have an undergraduate student start the semester with statelessness on their intellectual ‘radar’, much less hoping to prioritise the issue in their study of international human rights. At the graduate level, I have taught students earning master’s degrees in international relations at my home institution (in Saint Louis, United States of America, as well as at our campus in Leiden, the Netherlands), and also at the Università degli Studi di Milano in Italy. While these students come into the classroom with far more sophisticated ideas about international law, rights and citizenship, they are similarly surprised by the pervasiveness of statelessness and its negative consequences. This is true not only for Americans  who live in a country where jus soli nationality laws make statelessness less common, although certainly far from impossible  but also for students who have lived and worked in places where lack of nationality is far more widespread. By the time we reached the end of my spring 2018 ‘Statelessness and the “Right to Have Rights”’ course in Milan, one student  who in fact came from a country in Eastern Europe facing persistent problems with statelessness  was exasperated by the issue’s lack of visibility and attention. ‘This whole term, I’ve been telling people about statelessness’, she said. ‘And nobody knows about it. They know about refugees, sure, but not about statelessness. They don’t know what it means, they don’t know how it’s everywhere. They just don’t get it’. As is often the case, students came into the class without prior knowledge of statelessness; but once they learned about its scope and consequences, they became passionate defenders of nationality rights. Given these experiences, it is tempting to call for a field of ‘statelessness studies’ that focuses specifically on this long-ignored issue. Yet as a human rights educator and an interdisciplinary social scientist, I urge caution with this idea  or at least ask us to consider carefully our next steps. Human rights, including the fundamental right to a nationality, are interconnected and interdependent; ‘unless (nearly) all internationally recognized human rights are respected, a life of full 3 4 Council on Foreign Relations, ‘The Rohingya Crisis’ (5 December 2018) <https://www.cfr.org/backgrounder/rohingya-crisis>. The 1982 Burma Citizenship Law does not recognise the Rohingya as one of the country’s national races, effectively denying them the possibility of acquiring legal nationality. 166