‘People without a State Also Must Live’ There are two crucial points to consider in addressing the nexus between citizenship, nationality and ethnicity. Firstly, states have the sovereign right to determine their citizenship criteria as well as the power to restrict access to human rights for individuals who are excluded from those criteria. 39 Thus, the extent to which the contours of the ‘imagined community’ are reflected in a state’s citizenship criteria may differ, but where they are closely aligned the state generally has the authority to exclude potential citizens on such grounds. Secondly, Brubaker states that ‘definitions of citizenship continue to reflect deeply rooted understandings of nationhood’, 40 suggesting that citizenship criteria reflect ideas of the nation as ‘imagined’ by the dominant group and might therefore not be representative of the citizens of the nation-state in question. As a consequence of the state’s authority to determine its own citizenship criteria, Bosniak argues that citizenship can be used as a tool for institutionalising the dominant group’s particular idea of nationhood and national identity. 41 However, it is here valuable to consider Kristina Bakkær Simonsen’s finding that citizenship policies can be less important in shaping one’s sense of belonging than the boundaries of inclusion and exclusion drawn through political rhetoric and dominant conceptualisations of nationhood. 42 Through Bakkær Simonsen’s conceptual distinction between ascriptive criteria (such as having a particular ancestry) and attainable criteria (such as fluency in a language) needed to be recognised as a ‘full’ member of the national community, 43 it becomes apparent that formal citizenship criteria constitute only one part of the threshold that must be overcome in order to be considered a full citizen. A Citizenship as a Political Tool Through considering statelessness and citizenship within their appropriate political context and identifying the actors involved and the interests of these actors, both statelessness and citizenship can be understood as functioning as political tools and, in some cases, as tools of oppression. In seeking to identify the interests of the state in light of the previous discussion on citizenship as a mechanism of inclusion and exclusion, citizenship will here be considered as a tool used by states to operationalise their vision of the boundaries of the national community. Crucially, the state’s ability to exert its interests through citizenship is largely enabled through the sovereign rights granted to the state through the modern state system, alongside the reliance of individuals on states for citizenship in order to access rights and be recognised as existing within the given world order. Although dominant discourse on statelessness conceptualises the state as an emancipatory actor and generally considers citizenship acquisition as a blanket 39 40 41 42 43 Hayden (n 10) 253. Rogers Brubaker, Citizenship and Nationhood in France and Germany (Harvard University Press 1992) 3. Bosniak (n 28) 1293, 1306. Kristina Bakkær Simonsen, ‘“Us” or “Them”? How Policies, Public Opinion, and Political Rhetoric Affect Immigrants’ Sense of Belonging’, Migration Information Source (online, 2019) <https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/policies-public-opinion-rhetoricimmigrants-sense-belonging>. ibid. 289