elsewhere. Overall, these observations support the argument that debates on statelessness are above and beyond the re-examination of citizenship, rights, and legal status. Continuous proliferation of statelessness worldwide confirms the need for a more nuanced understanding of contemporary forms of membership attentive to the interplay between different rights regimes. Lack of citizenship does not constitute the bedrock of bare life. Instead, it reveals political subjectivity as an embodied and emplaced process, where subjects actively negotiate their position in the world and despite the state-centered understanding of legitimate politics. It is true that for Giorgio Agamben, refugees and by extrapolation the stateless can be seen as the ultimate biopolitical subjects (Owens 2009). Presumabl , the are regulated and governed in a permanent state of e ception without enjo ment of political freedom. But what if we think in terms of the formation of counter-publics and contestations of death by not just mere survival but also via formulations of alternative forms of political subjectivity and human dignity? What is at stake here is not more asylum rights, porous borders or the right of all humans to be recognised as legal subjects, either. The problem is the beneficial nature of the production and management of stateless populations, and this cannot be adequately grasped within the matrix of a Kantian model of universal rights falling back on the workings of institutions that are declared as legitimate despite the essential role they play in the facilitation of an infinite expansion of dispossession. Furthermore, the blurring of the distinction between biological and political lives to the degree of nullifying life that is not legally sanctioned as bare creates a very disconcerting residue: bare life easily slides into the civil death of Achiele Mmembe (Mmembe and Meinties 2003), thus further stripping stateless populations from even the potential of a future. The reduction of the stateless as a state of superfluousness and stateless people as living corpses , their death becoming an instrument of biopolitical and necropolitical powers, covers over the extensive use of these lives [and not just bodies] for the societies embracing normalization of statelessness for their own benefit and affluence. Hence is my suggestion that the disciplinary illusions of forced migration studies, whether relying on Hannah Arendt, Bertrand Ogilvie, Giorgio Agamben, or Achille Mbembe as their ontological safe harbour will ultimately fail to narrate the future of statelessness. 7