By-passing state power and neutralising state bureaucracies 43 The Convention on Certain Questions Relating to the Conflict of Nationality Laws (The Hague 1930) states: It is for each State to determine under its own law who are its nationals. This law shall be recognised by other States in so far as it is consistent with international conventions, international custom, and the principles of law generally recognised with regard to nationality. (Article 1)14 During the interwar years, concern over statelessness and nationality did not start out in international law as a human rights issue but rather an issue of ‘order management’ between states (Spiro 2011) or a conflict between states as to the nationality of individuals or groups.15 Stateless people were regarded as those who fell through the gaps between different states’ nationality rules to be resolved through arbitration (Siegelberg 2020). This notion persisted until after the ‘end’ of the Cold War when international technical legal assistance to better coordinate different countries’ nationality laws dominated international approaches to preventing statelessness (Foster and Lambert 2016). Statelessness was viewed as an ‘anomaly’ within this inter-state system (Weis 1979; de Chickera 2010). The stateless person in the first half of the 20th century was often depicted in popular fiction as a pirate or a cross-border criminal that represented a threat to both the national security and the international state systems (Siegelberg 2020). These ideas of the stateless person being a point of conflict between states and a security threat are also prevalent today.16 It has become more salient as countries in both the global north and south have attempted to harden the boundaries of both their territory and membership drawing on national security concerns to do so (Kingston 2013; D'Costa 2016). Often notions of race and national security intersect with the growth in surveillance technology to produce hard borders (Jones 2016; UNHRC Nov 2020). These bordering processes function through not only physical/territorial borders but also the rules of membership such as citizenship laws and immigration rules (UNHRC Nov 2020). Recent attention has been drawn to situations in which these bordering processes have involved citizenship stripping, for example, in Assam, India where the National Registration of Citizens (NRC) has disproportionately excluded people with Bengali heritage (Arraiza, Aye et al. 2020), and in the Dominican Republic where people of Haitian descent have increasingly been excluded from Dominican citizenship (Hayes de Kalaf 2020). From the perspective of border control when a person is stateless, they are ‘unremovable’ from a country where they are considered to be staying unlawfully.17 This may result in conflict between the states where that person has lived, or may become an ‘inconvenient aberration’ for state officials (Macklin 2015:231). Citizenship and associated documentation procedures