2018] NATIONALITY AND DEFINING “THE RIGHT TO HAVE RIGHTS” S881 ian Agenda, dedicating a chapter to “Statelessness and citizenship.” 169 In this chapter, UNHCR used the words “nationality” and “citizenship” interchangeably, in reference to States’ obligations under customary international law. UNHCR declared that “citizenship is a fundamental element of human security” insofar as it provides not only protection but also “a legal basis for the exercise of many civil and political rights.” 170 It reframed statelessness not as a lack of nationality but rather as the inability to enjoy the rights—including political rights—associated with citizenship. UNHCR cited political theorist Hannah Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism in support of this paradigm shift. In handbooks promulgated since, UNHCR has maintained that nationality bears on access to political rights and that the right to a nationality is tantamount to the right to a citizenship. 171 Following UNHCR’s decision to equate nationality and citizenship, prominent scholars writing on nationality law elected to do the same. Most notably, Peter Spiro has suggested that an international law of citizenship is crystallizing, “with all of its implications of equality and rights,” including access to “full political integration.” 172 In his work, he cites extensively to UNHCR reports and political theorists like Seyla Benhabib, 173 whose work analyzes and builds on the writings of Hannah Arendt. Unlike the developments in international law of the World War I and World War II eras, the proclamation of the right to a citizenship does not appear to be rooted in both State practice and opinio juris. The dissolution of particular Eastern European States did result in mass displacement of persons across Europe and Central Asia. States, however, responded to the new migrant, refugee, and statelessness crises by expanding UNHCR’s mandate—not by concluding multilateral treaties or making declarations reflective of a shift in the definition of nationality. Though few States in the post-colonial era maintain a distinction between their citizens and nationals, such distinctions do persist in parts of Europe, Africa, and the Americas. States, unlike UNHCR 169. U.N. HIGH COMMN’R FOR REFUGEES, THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S REFUGEES: A HUMANITARIAN AGENDA (1997). 170. Id. § 6. 171. See, e.g., U.N. HIGH COMMN’R FOR REFUGEES, THE STATE OF THE WORLD’S REFUGEES: IN SEARCH OF SOLIDARITY 14 (2012) (consistently referring to stateless persons’ “lack of citizenship,” as opposed to lack of nationality, and implying that Baltic State subjects—like the non-citizen Latvians discussed in the Introduction—are in fact stateless). 172. Peter Spiro, A New International Law of Citizenship, 105 AM. J. INT’L L. 694, 717 (2011). 173. Id. passim. Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2954729