2020
Statelessness & Citizenship Review
2(1)
identifies moments in time (whether in the post-World War II period or in today’s
refugee crises) when statelessness as a concept has been constructed in a way that
may not align with the lived experience of the stateless, and she advises scholars
that these particular models of statelessness may not correspond with to the
experiences of some populations living in certain types of post-colonial states. In
the case of both slavery and statelessness, she sees similar outcomes of a
‘racialised debasement of citizenship’ and similar opportunities for scholarly
engagement.
The work of Dr Katarina Schwarz and Dr Jean Allain addresses a different sort
of disconnect: between how slavery is addressed in international conventions
versus in domestic law. Although both freedom from forced labour and access to
citizenship are built into various international conventions to which states have
committed, domestic legislation can be inconsistent at the states’ level, leaving
gaps in full protection from these human rights abuses. In the case of slavery, all
193 United Nations member states are obliged to prohibit slavery under customary
international law. Despite this and other shared commitments, domestic
implementation remains scattered and inconsistent among these member states as
Schwarz and Allain found when they undertook the creation of their Antislavery
in Domestic Legislation database. This database, which launched early in 2020,
analyses thousands of provisions in over 1000 domestic statutes.
In their contribution to this symposium, they analyse some findings from the
database that illustrate the gaps in legislation and suggest how this product may
support anti-slavery work. In identifying regional legislative patterns and areas for
effective advocacy based in evidence, anti-slavery researchers can push for greater
accountability among states and more consistent implementation of international
commitments at the domestic level.
While significant comparative legal research is enriching the discussion on
slavery, those working as advocates for the stateless or enslaved, and those who
examine research on the same, face common challenges in their work. How does
one collect data about, or initiate outreach to, a population rendered in various
ways largely ‘invisible’ to states? How does a researcher give a voice and agency
to populations that share a likelihood of living in conditions that render them
fearful of state authorities? How can a research community become part of the
resources of the anti-slavery work in their communities?
Dr Alison Gardner and Dr Phil Northall describe a local approach — based in
the ‘place’ in which one finds slavery, giving agency to multiple stakeholders and
including the lived experiences of survivors — that was tested in Nottinghamshire
in the UK. They suggest that a place-based approach to research and advocacy in
stateless communities may face similar obstacles (for example, tensions between
national policy and local implementation causing fear of legal action such as
deportation). They also suggest, however, that statelessness researchers may find
similar advantages to this approach, such as the possibility of engagement across
a full community and development of a shared research agenda with wide
investment.
Where might slavery research fully intersect with statelessness in a shared
research agenda? Dr Davina Durgana focuses on challenges of measurement and
some possible tools to count hidden populations based on her experience as Report
Co-Author and Senior Statistician of the Global Slavery Index. Effective
measurement, so crucial to evidence-based advocacy and policy making to end
slavery, has similar utility for work on statelessness. Durgana focuses on two
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