Statelessness as a Product of Slippery Statecraft political imaginary, 14 wherein international space was carved up into states, each of which was to hold exclusive sovereignty over its territory and to enter into a social contract with its people. Though never a fully realised goal, determining who was subject to that social contract — that is, who are the citizens of a given state — was and continues to be considered a matter of national sovereignty in its classic sense. 15 Modern social contract theory held that citizen subjects would recognise the legitimacy of the sovereign power in exchange for protection of their rights. While all of these ideas — territory, citizenship, belonging, sovereignty, subjectivity and social contract — were, and to some extent continue to be, highly contested, the problematic tethering of citizenship to rights protection and fulfilment persists to this day. 16 Questions of citizenship entered the international realm in the interwar years, when many World War I survivors found themselves as stateless refugees, as Hannah Arendt explains in her classic work, The Origins of Totalitarianism. 17 In the lead-up to WWII, stripping of citizenship, or de-nationalisation, preceded unspeakable human rights violations against Jewish people and other minority groups. 18 Preventing another such atrocity was a central concern when laying the foundations of the liberal international order. The right to a nationality was recognised as a human right in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as was the right to leave one’s country of origin; at the same time, sovereign states were neither required to grant nationality nor entry. 19 After the 1951 adoption of the Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees (‘Refugee Convention’), 20 the United Nations adopted two conventions on statelessness as part of its international project of delimiting political power and extending liberal democratic concerns to the international sphere. 21 The 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons was designed to ensure a minimum set of rights and treatment of stateless people, 22 while the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness (‘1961 Convention’) called for safeguards to prevent statelessness and reduce it over time. 23 In addition to the aftermath of the World Wars, the twentieth century was marked by imperial breakdown, decolonisation and subsequent processes of state formation. As newly forming nation-states imposed their political imaginary on bounded territories, minority groups were often excluded from the new polity, leaving them effectively stateless, as is the case for the Palestinians vis-à-vis Israel 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 Nancy Fraser, ‘Who Counts? Dilemmas of Justice in a Postwestphalian World’ (2010) 41 Antipode 281, 282. Anderson (n 9) 28. ibid. Arendt (n 13) 344. ibid. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Ga Res 217A (III), UN Doc A/810 (10 December 1948) arts 13(2), 15. Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, opened for signature 28 July 1951, 189 UNTS 137 (entered into force 22 April 1954). David Held ‘Law of States, Law of Peoples: Three Models of Sovereignty’ 8(1) Legal Theory 1, 5. Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September 1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960); United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees ‘UN Conventions on Statelessness’ <https://www.unhcr.org/un-conventionson-statelessness.html>. Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, opened for signature 30 August 1961, 989 UNTS 175 (entered into force 13 December 1975) (‘1961 Convention’). 139