‘Humanising’ Statelessness
international law seems to stumble when she considers states for the protection of
the stateless people, when they are responsible for having made them stateless in
the first place.
Dominant Framing and Representations of Statelessness: Invisibility in
Statelessness
The kinds of literature discussed above are important to the analysis of
statelessness, but they suffer from a singular and linear way of seeing the subject.
This literature defines, categorises and theorises statelessness as centred on the
legal and nation-state framework. The framing of the issue relates to ‘nationality
law’, ‘international law’ and ‘citizenship statuses’. In this respect, stateless people
are merely visible through the lens of their legal status, they are represented as
‘rightless’ and ‘citizens of nowhere’. 50 Meanwhile, their experiences mostly
remain invisible. Phillip Cole criticised such positions. He stated ‘finding a
solution to statelessness is about asking radical questions about the international
political order’. 51 Cole also argued that
the theoretical basis for discourses of membership and mobility must be challenged
and transformed. What membership means has to be fought over, rather than taken
as our starting point. The fight is not just for membership, but also for its meaning.
And what we realise is that its meaning will be determined not by the theorists and
policy makers, but also by the stateless themselves acting out these ideas in their
everyday lives. What is needed is dialectic between theory and lived experience. 52
This position is very similar to the anthropological criticism of ‘sedentary
metaphysics’, which sees peoples and cultures categorised into national soils and
the family of nations. 53 Anthropologists taking up a postmodern view strongly
criticise the ‘territorialisation’ of people and culture within existing national
boundaries. 54 Lisa Malkki questions the idea of territorialisation and brings
forward the idea of ‘deterritorialisation’, which focuses instead on issues such as
migration experiences, the memory of dispossession and displacement and lived
responses to being uprooted. 55 However, these critical theories appear to be contra
to the dominant discourse; most political, legal and policy experts see statelessness
as a problem concerning citizenship and nationality. In doing so, they assume that
nationality is a natural concept and every person must have one. They
50
51
52
53
54
55
For an elaboration on this term see, eg, Citizens of Nowhere: Solutions for the Stateless in the
US (Report, UNHCR and Open Society Justice Initiative 2012).
Phillip Cole, ‘Insider Theory and the Construction of Statelessness’ in Tendayi Bloom,
Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 255,
258.
ibid 264 (emphasis in original).
Lisa Malkki, ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of
National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’ (1992) 7(1) Cultural Anthropology 24.
See, eg, Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’
(1990) 7(2–3) Theory, Culture & Society 295; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard University Press 1988);
Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Beacon Press 1989);
Ulf Hannerz, ‘The World in Creolisation’ (1987) 57(4) Africa: Journal of the International
African Institute 546.
Lisa Malkki (n 53), cited in Dawn Chatty, ‘Anthropology and Forced Migration’ in Elena
Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration
Studies (Oxford University Press 2014) 74, 75.
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