BOOK REVIEW STATELESSNESS, GOVERNANCE, AND THE PROBLEM OF CITIZENSHIP, EDITED BY TENDAYI BLOOM AND LINDSEY N KINGSTON (MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS 2021) 400 PAGES. PRICE £90.00. ISBN 9781526156419 MARNIE LLOYDD * Bloom and Kingston’s edited volume Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship opens with the striking remark: ‘For too long, the study of “statelessness” has focused on technical legal issues’. 1 Citizenship is commonly understood to operate as an ‘international sorting system’; 2 a system based on the nation-state as the ‘sole legitimate organizing unit of global politics’. 3 It is the lack of citizenship — statelessness — that is usually considered to be the problem. 4 This is because it is understood to put at risk the rights, protection and emancipation that citizenship offers, or to deny them outright. Within the logic of the liberal state-based international legal order, statelessness is like a bug in the system, an anomaly; stateless persons are persons who have not been appropriately ‘sorted’. Logically, then, the conferral of citizenship offers a remedy to this problem. Reflecting this state-centric logic, much important work on statelessness has focused on identifying, quantifying and ending legal statelessness, while in the meantime, seeking better treatment and protection of stateless persons. 5 Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship challenges this orthodox understanding of statelessness as the problem and citizenship as the solution. It demands that we re-think these assumptions by redefining citizenship as the problem. * 1 2 3 4 5 Marnie Lloydd is Lecturer and Associate-Director of the New Zealand Centre for Public Law at Te Herenga Waka/Victoria University of Wellington, Faculty of Law. Tendayi Bloom and Lindsey N Kingston, ‘Introduction: Opening a Conversation about Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship’ in Tendayi Bloom and Lindsey N Kingston (eds), Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester University Press 2021) 1. ibid 2. Mira L Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press 2020) 6. Pursuant to the Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September 1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960) art 1, statelessness occurs when a person ‘is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’. See, for example, Lindsey N Kingston, ‘Worthy of Rights: Statelessness as a Cause and Symptom of Marginalisation’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 17; Bloom and Kingston (n 1) 2–3.