Unwanted and ambivalent citizenship 89 This also challenges the reality of citizenship, for if it can be experienced as imposition by some, then even if most individuals would not contest their citizenship, it is hard to understand it as consensual or free more generally. The lacrosse case discussed above shows one example of what happens when indi viduals contest liberal democratic citizenship and indicates that the consensual nature of US citizenship (in this example) is more tenuous than it can sometimes seem. This extends beyond colonial contexts. The European Union Democracy Observatory (EUDO) on Citizenship keeps up-to-date information on the rules surrounding the renunciation of cit izenship in 77 States in Europe and the Americas.33 Only 16 per cent of the 77 States included in the survey allow someone to become stateless if that person chooses to renounce her/is citizenship. Conversely, 16 per cent require that a person already has citizenship of another State before citizenship can be renounced, and 27 per cent require that the individual be resident overseas in order to renounce citizenship. This makes sense, seeing as most of the States in the survey are signatories of the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of State lessness. These measures stop a person from becoming stateless (with its asso ciated deprivations), but they also inhibit the possibility of contestation. Looking in more detail at the results, also indicates a distinction in this between citizens who became citizens at birth and those who became citizens through choice later in life. An anomaly that occurs in five of the States studied in the EUDO project with regard to naturalised citizens raises wider questions for the interweaving of citizenship and noncitizenship. Citizens-by-birth of Ecuador, Haiti, Mexico and Nicaragua cannot renounce their citizenship. Citizens-by-birth of Venezuela can only do so if they already have citizenship of somewhere else. Yet, for natural ised citizens (those who have chosen to become formal citizens) of these States the situation is quite different. They can renounce their citizenship (though natu ralised Haitians must be residing abroad, and naturalised Mexicans, like natural ised Venezuelans, must receive another citizenship). The legal reasons for this aside, this seems to suggest that there are those who can make decisions about their citizenship and there are those who cannot. That is, someone who has chosen to take up Mexican citizenship can also choose to renounce it, while someone born into Mexican citizenship cannot make such a choice. This seems strange. But it also relates to something found in a much broader range of States. EUDO scholar Henio Hoyo has analysed the reasons for this discrepancy in some of the States involved in the project. He suggests that it arises in the Mexican context as a result of ethno-national identity-formation.34 Hoyo observes that, while 33 EUDO CITIZENSHIP (2016) ‘Mode L01: Renunciation’ in Global Database on Modes of Loss of Citizenship, san Domenica di Fiesole, European University Institute. Data correct as of 1 January 2016. 34 Henio Hoyo (2015) ‘Apertura externa, exclusión interna: El nacionalismo Revolucionario y los dere chos de migrantes, mexicanos por naturalización, y dobles nacionales en México’, Working Paper No. 87, desigualdades.net Research Network on Interdependent Inequalities in Latin America.