2020 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2(1) the ‘hierarchy of personhood’. 3 She goes beyond the usual categories of belonging caused by migratory movements and looks at groups marginalised because of their way of life, their status as indigenous peoples or markers of race and class. On the basis of that analysis, she argues that our current binary system of legal citizenship and non-citizenship (or statelessness) fails to protect individuals’ rights to place and purpose and thereby, ultimately, threatens the universality of human rights.4 Kingston argues that ‘legal nationality is not enough to be recognized as fully human’. 5 Against that background, she introduces the notion of ‘functioning citizenship’ as a form of meaningful membership in the political community for all, which is based on an active and mutually beneficial relationship between an individual and a state and goes beyond a mere legal status. 6 With her book, Kingston has the ambitious aim to remedy structural weaknesses in the modern human rights regime and close protection gaps for people at the margins. 7 The book is structured around six groups of persons affected by hierarchies of personhood and dysfunctional citizenship. A first, theoretical Part scrutinises the constructions of political membership and worthiness prevailing in international human rights law, critically discusses the development of contradictory concepts of citizenship in political thought — which are posited as rights, identities or commodities — and the inherent tension between state sovereignty and legal nationality underlying the international human rights regime in Chapter One. Chapter Two then opens the discussion to the different case studies. It starts by examining statelessness as the extreme, most blatant form of lack of functioning citizenship. Kingston discusses the concept of statelessness in modern political theory and law and reminds the reader that statelessness does not happen in a vacuum. 8 Rather, statelessness is the result of marginalisation and discrimination. By being denied legal citizenship, stateless persons are not only denied political rights, but rights to place and purpose in a much broader sense. Accordingly, in legalistic solutions aiming at attribution of legal nationality, the issuance of identity documents or the granting of political rights alone cannot compensate for functioning citizenship. Chapter Three on forced displacement deals with forcibly displaced persons — asylum seekers, refugees and internally displaced persons — who, despite formally having a legal nationality, lack functioning citizenship to their state of nationality. 9 International refugee law and the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, Kingston argues, fail to effectively fill these protection gaps. 10 Instead, they posit displacement as the ‘abnormal’, often framed as an emergency or crisis, whereby short-term solutions are privileged and functioning citizenship is continuously denied. 11 This reinforces hierarchies of personhood and might increase sentiments of mistrust among the citizens of host countries. Looking at the situation of refugees in camps, Kingston illustrates how the rights to place and purpose of forcibly displaced persons are routinely violated and denied. 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 ibid 5. ibid 5–6. ibid 53–54. ibid 18. ibid 23. ibid 67. ibid 80–81. ibid 81–86. ibid 86–87. 191