S882 COLUMBIA JOURNAL OF TRANSNATIONAL LAW [56:S855 and select scholars, have refrained from criticizing these persisting non-citizen national practices. U.N. resolutions have never referred to non-citizen nationals as stateless, nor have they used the terms nationality and citizenship interchangeably. This Section discusses the nationality-related events of the early 1990s, leading up to UNHCR’s receipt of the statelessness mandate. It then discusses UNHCR’s and scholars’ ensuing assertions of customary international law and assesses those assertions in light of contemporary State practice and opinio juris. Identifying that UNHCR and scholars have overstated the scope of customary international law, this Section considers the implications of these institutions’ overstatements of law, generally, and this overstatement, in particular. A. The End of the Cold War and the Expanded Role of UNHCR By the late 1960s, post-World War II concern regarding stateless persons had waned. No longer an immediate issue for the global community, and less likely to “arouse international interest from the humanitarian and political angle” than refugee crises, 174 statelessness and nationality law advocacy gained little traction. 175 Indeed, by 1980, only thirty-one States had ratified the 1954 Statelessness Convention and only nine States had ratified the 1961 Convention. 176 Global complacency with respect to statelessness ended in the early 1990s. The dissolution of the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, and Yugoslavia, 177 as well as the use of denationalization as a political weapon in particular African States, 178 brought nationality law back to the fore by 1995. An estimated sixty million people—Balts, Poles, Chechens, and others forcibly displaced from Russia pursuant to Stalinist relocation policies, and Russians previously induced to settle in nonRussian Soviet Republics—lost their Soviet nationality and were living as ethnic minorities dispersed across the new States of Eastern 174. Paul Weis, The Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons (1961), 10 INT’L & COMP. L. Q. 255, 263 (1961). 175. Matthew Seet, The Origins of UNHCR's Global Mandate on Statelessness, 28 INT’L J. REFUGEE L. 7, 16 (2016) (“States’ reactions to UNHCR’s attempts to engage them on statelessness ranged from indifference to rejection.”). 176. Id. 177. Id. at 18. 178. Cecile Pouilly, Africa’s Hidden Problem, 147 REFUGEES MAGAZINE 28, 30 (2007). Electronic copy available at: https://ssrn.com/abstract=2954729