‘I Must Be from Somewhere. I’m Not from the Moon’ participants were on this almost automatic pathway to citizenship, having been granted permanent residence status as refugees. Deema described how the new refugee label the SMA imposed on her would finally allow her to shed her prior Palestinian refugee label: Some people may say that: ‘Okay you’re not a refugee anymore, you’ve abandoned Palestine’. But I remained a refugee for 63 years and I never saw anything from Palestine. But after two years from this appointment [at the SMA] I can become Swedish? The first trip I make the moment I get citizenship will be from [Sweden] to Tel Aviv. 69 Acquiring citizenship in Sweden can be understood as a bureaucratic erasure of former asylum/migration labels. However, while claiming that acquiring citizenship would end their refugeeness, many participants did not perceive this as also being an end to their Palestinianness/statelessness. As Mamdouh claimed: Personally, I differentiate between my identity and my legal status. Legally, I’m not a citizen of anywhere, legally I’m stateless — but I am Palestinian, this is my identity. When I will soon get Swedish citizenship, I will legally be a Swedish citizen but I’ll still be Palestinian. That will never change. 70 While Mamdouh will have a citizenship for the first time in his life and, thus, not be stateless under Swedish or international law, citizenship for him and Deema can be understood as what Elizabeth Mavroudi described as ‘pragmatic citizenship’. 71 This concept, which resulted from Mavroudi’s research with stateless Palestinians in Greece, identified that Greek citizenship was ‘sought, acquired and negotiated for pragmatic and strategic reasons and can result in dual or multiple feelings of belonging and attachment as well as de/reterritorialisation’. 72 Indeed, for Deema, the acquisition of Swedish citizenship was not seen as her abandoning her Palestinian label, but rather as a practical step towards being able to finally visit Palestine for the first time since she fled. CONCLUSION To shed light on the relationship between statelessness and refugeeness, this research drew on the narratives of 22 PRS who fled from Syria to Sweden. It focused on how they, as stateless refugees upon whom various labels are, were or were not imposed, conceptualised the relationship between these labels over time and space. It showed how these labels can be understood as being interconnected, sequential, highly fluid and simultaneously restrictive. The relationship was also shown to be situationally instructed and context dependent, though with spillover from one context to another in some circumstances (largely related to their Palestinianness or Syrian Palestinianness). This spillover sometimes led to the participants’ exclusion from the privileges available to other refugees or stateless persons, such as during their transit through Europe. At other times, labels were hidden for pragmatic reasons; participants threw away documents stating that they were PRS or deployed documents as a way of resisting the erasure of their 69 70 71 72 Interview with Deema, 71 years old from Yarmouk (Tom Rollins, 20 April 2017). Interview with Mamdouh, 46 years old from Yarmouk (Jason Tucker, 10 February 2017). Elizabeth Mavroudi, ‘Palestinians and Pragmatic Citizenship: Negotiating Relationships between Citizenship and National Identity in Diaspora’ (2008) 39(1) Geoforum 307, 310. ibid 310. 345