2021 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 3(2) hardly any social and political science scholarship focusing explicitly on this phenomenon’, 29 what becomes key is continued engagement between academics, humanitarian and other practitioners working on such issues in areas of armed conflict or contested sovereignty where there is significant knowledge and experience (as the authors do as part of their wider project, which seeks to document people’s lives and the ‘lives’ of documents to see how they are affected by rebel governance 30) as well as, of course, with affected people to the extent possible, and probably also between international lawyers and political scientists. Overall, given that such divided and parallel governance structures are part of many people’s lived experiences, this chapter makes the practical point that rather than simply rejecting such conferrals of legal identity as improper/illegal or unrecognised, states, global elites and civil society need to better understand the messy realities of governance, legal identity and also statelessness that can be produced and which have to be relied upon in various ways during armed conflict. Finally, Natalia Kasianenko’s ‘Statelessness and Governance in the Absence of Recognition: The Case of the “Donetsk People’s Republic”’ 31 provides a contextual example of the issues discussed in the two above-mentioned chapters linked to the political power and social control inherent in citizenship governance, and the multiple levels of legality and recognition involved when sovereign governance is contested. Kasianenko highlights tools of governance relied upon as a strategy for strengthening internal legitimacy in the self-proclaimed Donetsk People’s Republic in the Donbas region of Ukraine. Residents of Donbas have been able to obtain passports from the Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics, although these passports are not recognised internationally. This chapter explores how the situation can translate into one akin to statelessness, for example, in relation to people who cannot easily renew their Ukrainian passport, or for children born in the Donetsk or Luhansk People’s Republics since the beginning of the conflict. Ukraine, in turn, has had to work out how to formally recognise birth and death certificates issued in the Donbas region. This chapter illustrates how citizenship governance can become another form of ‘lawfare’ in armed conflict and its aftermath. Stepping back to view the volume as a whole, one of its strengths is precisely the global range of different authors, backgrounds, perspectives and lived experiences that it brings together. The broad range of topics means that the book can appear at first glance somewhat unfocused or unruly. The topics range from cultural statelessness linked to the effects of climate change in Pacific states, to transnational surrogacy, sex and gender norms in birth certificates, and armed conflict. I see this ‘unruliness’, however, as the editors seeking to demonstrate in practice the approach for which the book is arguing. I see it as courageously starting the necessary and somewhat messy work of exploring the governance of citizenship through the complexities of sociolegal context, paying attention to histories, lived experience and differing perspectives. As an international lawyer, I take away from this volume that although lawyers might understand statelessness primarily as an issue of legal and political 29 30 31 Fortin, Klem and Sosnowski (n 35) 130. ibid 134 n 1. Natalia Kasianenko, ‘Statelessness and Governance in the Absence of Recognition: The Case of the ‘Donetsk People’s Republic’ in Tendayi Bloom and Lindsey N Kingston (eds), Statelessness, Governance, and the Problem of Citizenship (Manchester University Press 2021) 112. 364