2019 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 1(1) It was through teaching statelessness for the first time that I became more aware of the power of the forced-displacement paradigm here. I set a question: ‘Does statelessness pose a distinct challenge for the international system? If so, how should it be addressed?’, and some students chose to answer it, using the Rohingya as a key case study. But in marking the essays I realised that the students were trapped within the paradigm — the challenge they believed statelessness posed for the international system was one of forced displacement, and could only be addressed through strengthening the rights of refugees. The case study of the Rohingya, without fail, was discussed in relation to their forced displacement from Myanmar — in other words as refugees rather than as stateless persons. I take some responsibility for this, as I embedded the topic in a section of the module titled ‘Global Migration’, and sandwiched it among discussions of migration and forced displacement, so that I placed it within the ‘traditional’ paradigms, and could not reasonably expect students to ‘displace’ it. I need to think seriously about how and where I teach students statelessness next time round, enabling them to see that the stateless are ‘dis-placed’ in a distinctive and particularly dangerous way. The temptation to believe we can include the stateless within our political theory with a minor tweak to our discussions of forced displacement and protection for refugees is misplaced. We need to radically rethink how we understand membership, indeed how we do political theory as such. The implication is that we need to break out of the paradigms the discussion of statelessness is currently locked into — of original membership, of voluntary movement and of forced displacement. And we may need to break out of the biggest paradigm of all, one that political theory itself is locked into: that of political membership. One solution to the challenge of statelessness is that we all become stateless. If membership is locked into the nation-state system and if that system systematically produces statelessness, then we have to look beyond that system. But to imagine a world without membership is a step few are prepared to take, either in practice or in their political imagination. I wait with interest to see what impact the discussion of statelessness will have on political practice and political theory — whether it will ever be taken as seriously as it should be, given its radical implications. I hope I have made and will continue to make some contribution to that discussion, both through research and teaching, and welcome the establishment of the Statelessness and Citizenship Review as a space for those developments. 164