BOOK REVIEW STATELESSNESS: A MODERN HISTORY BY MIRA L SIEGELBERG (HARVARD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2020) 328 PAGES. PRICE $35.00. ISBN 9780674976313 NATALIE BRINHAM * Amartya Sen once said of the world’s largest stateless population, ‘the Rohingya did not come to Burma, Burma first came to the Rohingya’. 1 This is a poignant reminder that for some peoples who pre-exist today’s state borders, the violence of statelessness was produced in the state boundaries of membership and territory. In a similar vein, Mira Siegelberg’s book, Statelessness: A Modern History is a powerful reminder that statelessness was not simply a human rights issue that landed on the doorstep of international law requiring legal remedy. Rather, statelessness was produced in the collisions between empire, sovereignty, selfdetermination and internationalism. Statelessness is, itself, also a product of the state system and international order. Statelessness: A Modern History is not only a history of statelessness. In meticulously researching the ever-changing paradigms of statelessness, Siegelberg has also crafted a story about the evolution of international law and political philosophy. She invites the reader to look back beyond the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness 2 and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (‘UDHR’), 3 to the early 20th Century to understand how the national territorial state emerged as the ‘sole legitimate organizing unit of global politics’. 4 She considers the implications for those people who have been placed beyond the boundaries of the state system as a result of these transformations. The reader is taken on a journey from the breakup of the hierarchical international political order of empires and imperialisms during and after the First World War, through to the reconstruction of the international state system after 1945 based on formal equality between states. By contextualising statelessness within these historic processes, Siegelberg captures how ideas were shaken and forged by the moral and political imperatives of the day. She reveals how constructions of modern-day statelessness took shape within shifting tides of international legal and political thought; and, * 1 2 3 4 The author is a programme officer at the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion and a PhD student at Queen Mary University of London. The Slow-Burning Genocide of the Rohingyas (Harvard Global Equality Initiative Conference, Harvard University 4 November 2014) (Conference attended by author). Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September 1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960); Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, opened for signature 30 August 1961, 989 UNTS 185 (entered into force 13 December 1975). Universal Declaration of Human Rights, GA Res 217A (III), UN GAOR, 3rd sess, 183rd plen mtg, UN Doc A/810 (10 December 1948). Mira L Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press 2020) 6.