2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(2) ‘It becomes clear that the underlying problem is not statelessness itself, but rather it is citizenship — including both the ways in which citizenship is governed and how it is used as a governance tool’. 6 This builds on earlier calls for greater understanding of the ‘subtle realities’ underlying statelessness. 7 It includes understanding that the conferral of nationality will not necessarily resolve systemic issues of marginalisation and, therefore, that citizenship status ought to be decoupled from effective protection of an individual’s rights. 8 We can also consider that the ‘model of statehood which underpins many contemporary accounts of nationality and statelessness is still at odds with the reality in much of the world’. 9 The legal approaches referred to in the opening of the book are not being rejected as wrong or always unhelpful. Rather, by flipping the question underlying the problem, this volume is offering something more exciting and complex. This volume challenges the reader, and perhaps international lawyers in particular, not only to broaden their viewpoint, but to reconceptualise critically the issue on which they are working; to recognise that ‘technical legal approaches’ risk blinkering practitioners and scholars from better understanding people’s lived experiences, including the role of international law in producing those experiences. It also challenges the reader to interrogate other forms of relationship between people and states, or entities other than internationally recognised states. In this way, understanding statelessness as a negative — the lack of citizenship — becomes insufficient for conceptualising the web of noncitizenism in the world that Tendayi Bloom has previously described. In her earlier book, Noncitizenism: Recognising Noncitizen Capabilities in a World of Citizens, Bloom discussed how even those lacking citizenship have an important relationship with the state in question, even if this might be a relationship of vulnerability or impairment of rights and capabilities. Likewise, the state in question has a relationship with them. 10 Reflecting this, and importantly, the volume necessarily understands statelessness not as an exceptional or temporary problem, like a waiting room where ‘illegal’ people are suspended from their ongoing lives, lives they will be able to get on with again as soon as they manage to obtain legal citizenship. Rather, statelessness can be a permanent, normalised, systemic situation of the international legal order, predicated upon the sorting of people into state nationalities, and therefore with the power to include and exclude. The liminal space between non-legal recognition and legal recognition — the ‘not yet’ — also has an ‘in the meantime’, a lived experience and historical and ongoing context to 6 7 8 9 10 Bloom and Kingston (n 1) 1. Kingston, ‘Worthy of Rights’ (n 5) 17. ibid; Jo Shaw, The People in Question: Citizens and Constitutions in Uncertain Times (Bristol University Press 2020), 190: ‘citizenship is always likely to disappoint those who invest in it the hopes that it will deliver equality and inclusion’, cited in Natalie Baird, ‘Constitutions, Citizenship and the Shadow of Statelessness’ (2020) 2(2) Statelessness & Citizenship Review 377, 382; Katja Swider, ‘Why End Statelessness?’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 191. Kelly Staples, ‘Recognition, Nationality, and Statelessness: State-Based Challenges for UNHCR’s Plan to End Statelessness’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 174. Tendayi Bloom, Noncitizenism: Recognising Noncitizen Capabilities in a World of Citizens (Routledge 2017). For a good summary of the book’s arguments, see also Katherine Tonkiss’ review of Bloom’s book, Katherine Tonkiss, ‘Noncitizenism: Recognising Noncitizen Capabilities in a World of Citizens by Tendayi Bloom’ (2020) 8(1) Migration Studies 135. 360