62 Banal dehumanisation other humans.3 In recent history, ‘Tutsi’ has been made synonymous with ‘cockroach’ and ‘Jew’ with ‘rat’ before genocidal projects could be possible.4 In these cases, perpetrators have avoided seeing their victims as less than human.5 Banal dehumanisation is not so obvious. It involves small, implicit, and incremental instances that combine to construct and reinforce a framework that defines some people as being of lesser worth than others. The banal dehumanisation of ‘unwanted’ noncitizens can be seen in several languages’ colloquial references to irregular immigrants and stateless persons. The Arabic term ‘bidoon’, for example, is an adjective meaning ‘without’. Short for ‘bidoon jinseeya’, or ‘without nationality’, the word is commonly used as a noun to refer to a person. Broadly, it can refer to anyone without relevant documents, but narrowly it is used to refer to those persons who did not obtain citizenship when the modern States of the Arabian Gulf were formed, and the descendants of those persons.6 Something similar can be seen in the French and Spanish adjectival phrases ‘sans papiers’ and ‘sin papeles’, respectively, meaning ‘without papers’, used as nouns to describe fully persons and their relationships with the States in question.7 3 For example, Jonathan Glover (2012) Humanity: A Moral History of the 20th Century 2nd Edition, Yale University Press. 4 See analysis by Gregory Stanton, which also provides wider insight in this context: Gregory Stanton (2004) ‘Could the Rwandan Genocide Have Been Prevented?’, pp. 211–228 in Journal of Genocide Research 6(2). Stig Hornshoj-Moller, for example, examines the rat metaphor and the role of the media more generally. See also Stig Hornshoj-Moller (1998) ‘ “The Eternal Jew” – A Blueprint for Genocide in the Nazi Film Archives’, paper presented at the Genocide Studies Program Seminar, Yale University, 15 October 1998; Ben Kiernan (2008) Blood and soil: A World History of Genocide and Extermination from Sparta to Darfur, Yale University Press; David Livingstone Smith (2012) Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others, St Martin’s Press; see also Jess Melvin (2018 forthcoming) Mechanics of Mass Murder, Routledge. Kristy Belton refers to more recent references to those denationalised in the Caribbean as ‘pigs, hogs, and dogs’: Kristy Belton (2015) ‘Rooted Displacement: The Paradox of Belonging Among Stateless People’, Citizenship Studies 19(8), p. 912. 5 For example, see Richard Rorty (1993) ‘Human Rights, Rationality and Sentimentality’, reprinted at pp. 107–131 in Aakash Singh Rathore and Alex Cistelecan (eds) (2011) Wronging Rights? Phil osophical Challenges for Human Rights, Routledge; Michael Ignatieff (2001) ‘Human Rights as Politics’, Human Rights p. 3; Steven Lukes (2005) ‘Liberal Democratic Torture’, British Journal of Political Science 36 p. 15. See also Glover 2012 ibid. 6 Zahra Al Barazi and Jason Tucker (2017) ‘Challenging the Disunity of Statelessness in the Middle East and North Africa’, pp. 87–101 in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds) (2017) Understanding Statelessness, Routledge. Also, Maureen Lynch (2010) ‘Without Face or Future: Stateless Infants, Children and Youth’, pp. 117–140 in Marisa Ensor and Elzbieta Gozdziak (eds) (2010) Children and Migration: At the Crossroads of Resiliency and Vulnerability, Palgrave Macmillan. 7 For example, see Andreu Casero Ripollés (2007) ‘Discurso mediático, inmigración e ilegalidad: legitimar la exclusión a través de la noticia’, pp. 69–90 in Ricard Zapata-Barrero and Teun A. Van Dijk (eds) (2007) Discursos Sobre La Inmigración en España: Los medios de comunicación, los parlamentos y las administraciones, Fundació CIDOB; Anne McNevin (2006) ‘Political Belonging in a Neoliberal Era: The Struggle of the Sans-Papiers’, pp. 135–151 in Citizenship Studies 10(2).