COMMENTARY TOWARDS A STATELESS STANDPOINT EPISTEMOLOGY HAQQI BAHRAM * TABLE OF CONTENTS Feminist Standpoint Theory.................................................................................. 114 Outlining Stateless Standpoint Epistemology ....................................................... 116 A Situated Experience of Statelessness ........................................................ 116 B Collective Intersubjectivity ...................................................................... 116 C Epistemic Agency ..................................................................................... 117 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 118 To date, most research about stateless populations is undertaken by researchers who have never been stateless themselves, and so is the evaluation of this research across various disciplines. While this distinction between the study and the experience is a common issue for many similar subjects, it does have consequences on what and how knowledge is produced on statelessness. The most obvious result is that understanding statelessness is predominantly citizenist in nature, whereby citizen researchers have often juxtaposed the lack of nationality against citizenship in a world organised through the naturalised institution of the state. 1 As statelessness research is developing within and across several academic disciplines, there is a need for critical reviews on how the phenomenon is broadly explored and theorised. Feminist scholarship, in this regard, can provide several tools for such an endeavour as it has historically challenged forms of knowledge and analysis of issues through critical approaches such as standpoint theory and intersectionality. 2 Underpinned by Judith Butler’s account of ‘troubling’ naturalised forms of knowledge, 3 feminist thought inspires us to ‘trouble’ and problematise the naturalised knowledge on statelessness that operates within a predominantly citizenist structure of the world. 4 By adopting such critical approaches, statelessness research could open up to substantial forms of * 1 2 3 4 Haqqi Bahram is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for Research on Migration, Ethnicity and Society (REMESO), Linköping University, Sweden. His research focuses on intersections of statelessness and identity formation in contexts of forced migration. My position here and in the rest of the commentary draws upon the idea of ‘citizenist organization of the world’ as discussed in: Tendayi Bloom, Noncitizenism: Recognising Noncitizen Capabilities in a World of Citizens (Routledge 2018) 25. See Deirdre Brennan, ‘Statelessness and the Feminist Toolbox: Another Man-Made Problem with a Feminist Solution?’ (2019) 24(2) Tilburg Law Review 170. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (Routledge 1990) 5. In the philosophy of science, naturalised epistemology has often been associated with positivist principles of objectivity and impartiality. In the context of this commentary, naturalised knowledge is used both literally and metaphorically to refer to conventional ways of producing knowledge about statelessness where the state and citizenship are seen natural and taken for granted by citizen researchers.