In Stateless Citizenship, Shourideh C. Molavi examines the mechanisms of exclusion of Palestinian citizens in the Zionist incorporation regime, and centres our analytical gaze on the paradox that it is through the provision of Israeli citizenship that Palestinians are deemed stateless.

'In our supposedly borderless world, having a nationality, and thus access to documents which permit travel and proof of identity, has become increasingly important. In many parts of the world, including the cases in Europe, Africa and Asia covered in this collection, large groups of people struggle with forms of de facto or de jure statelessness. In addition to providing a conceptual framework derived from international human rights norms for understanding better the phenomenon of statelessness, this collection presents important empirical research material helping us to understand, from the ground up, how statelessness is experienced.' Jo Shaw, University of Edinburgh, UK 'What difference does citizenship make? The vulnerability of stateless persons clearly demonstrates the benefits of having a nationality. But so far nobody has examined how much the situation of stateless persons improves when they finally get documents and citizenship status. This exploratory study analyses practical difficulties and real progress in overcoming statelessness. It gives voice to the victims and sets a political agenda. Academic researchers, non-governmental organizations and policy-makers should read this book.' Rainer Bauböck, European University Institute, Florence, Italy 'Embracing a subject that is generally treated abstractly, as a matter of human rights law, the authors of this pathbreaking book root statelessness deep into historical context and lived experience. They emerge with conclusions that are both dismaying (the expansive scope of the problem) and hopeful (the measurable progress some states have made in expanding the boundaries of citizenship). Alas, this eloquent book could hardly be more timely.' Linda K. Kerber, University of Iowa, US The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that there are more than 12 million stateless people in the world. The existence of stateless populations challenges some central tenets of international law and contemporary human rights discourses, yet only a very small number of states have made measurable progress in helping individuals acquire or regain citizenship. This fascinating study examines positive developments in eight countries and pinpoints the benefits of citizenship now enjoyed by formerly stateless persons. The expert contributors present an original comparative study that draws upon legal and political analysis as well as empirical research (incorporating over 120 interviews conducted in eight countries), and features the documentary photography of Greg Constantine. The benefits of citizenship over statelessness are identified at both community and individual level, and include the fundamental right to enjoy a nationality, to obtain identification documents, to be represented politically, to access the formal labor market and to move about freely. Gaining or reacquiring citizenship helps eliminate isolation and solicits the empowerment of individuals, collectively and personally. Such changes are of considerable importance to the advancement of a human rights regime based on dignity and respect. This highly original and thought-provoking book will strongly appeal to a wide-ranging audience including academics, researchers, students, human rights activists and government officials with an interest in a diverse range of fields encompassing law, international studies, public policy, human rights and citizenship.

When a person is not recognised as a citizen anywhere, they are typically referred to as ‘stateless’. This can give rise to challenges both for individuals and for the institutions that try to govern them. Statelessness, governance, and the problem of citizenship breaks from tradition by relocating the ‘problem’ to be addressed from one of statelessness to one of citizenship. It problematises the governance of citizenship – and the use of citizenship as a governance tool – and traces the ‘problem of citizenship’ from global and regional governance mechanisms to national and even individual levels. With contributions from activists, affected persons, artists, lawyers, academics, and national and international policy experts, this volume rejects the idea that statelessness and stateless persons are a problem. It argues that the reality of statelessness helps to uncover a more fundamental challenge: the problem of citizenship.

Contrary to predictions that it would become increasingly redundant in a globalizing world, citizenship is back with a vengeance. The Oxford Handbook of Citizenship brings together leading experts in law, philosophy, political science, economics, sociology, and geography to provide a multidisciplinary, comparative discussion of different dimensions of citizenship: as legal status and political membership; as rights and obligations; as identity and belonging; as civic virtues and practices of engagement; and as a discourse of political and social equality or responsibility for a common good. The contributors engage with some of the oldest normative and substantive quandaries in the literature, dilemmas that have renewed salience in today's political climate. As well as setting an agenda for future theoretical and empirical explorations, this Handbook explores the state of citizenship today in an accessible and engaging manner that will appeal to a wide academic and non-academic audience. Chapters highlight variations in citizenship regimes practiced in different countries, from immigrant states to 'non-western' contexts, from settler societies to newly independent states, attentive to both migrants and those who never cross an international border. Topics include the 'selling' of citizenship, multilevel citizenship, in-between statuses, citizenship laws, post-colonial citizenship, the impact of technological change on citizenship, and other cutting-edge issues. This Handbook is the major reference work for those engaged with citizenship from a legal, political, and cultural perspective. Written by the most knowledgeable senior and emerging scholars in their fields, this comprehensive volume offers state-of-the-art analyses of the main challenges and prospects of citizenship in today's world of increased migration and globalization. Special emphasis is put on the question of whether inclusive and egalitarian citizenship can provide political legitimacy in a turbulent world of exploding social inequality and resurgent populism.

The story of how a much-contested legal category—statelessness—transformed the international legal order and redefined the relationship between states and their citizens. Two world wars left millions stranded in Europe. The collapse of empires and the rise of independent states in the twentieth century produced an unprecedented number of people without national belonging and with nowhere to go. Mira Siegelberg’s innovative history weaves together ideas about law and politics, rights and citizenship, with the intimate plight of stateless persons, to explore how and why the problem of statelessness compelled a new understanding of the international order in the twentieth century and beyond. In the years following the First World War, the legal category of statelessness generated novel visions of cosmopolitan political and legal organization and challenged efforts to limit the boundaries of national membership and international authority. Yet, as Siegelberg shows, the emergence of mass statelessness ultimately gave rise to the rights regime created after World War II, which empowered the territorial state as the fundamental source of protection and rights, against alternative political configurations. Today we live with the results: more than twelve million people are stateless and millions more belong to categories of recent invention, including refugees and asylum seekers. By uncovering the ideological origins of the international agreements that define categories of citizenship and non-citizenship, Statelessness better equips us to confront current dilemmas of political organization and authority at the global level.

From the 1920s to the eve of the Pacific War in 1941, more than 50,000 young second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) embarked on transpacific journeys to the Japanese Empire, putting an ocean between themselves and pervasive anti-Asian racism in the American West. Born U.S. citizens but treated as unwelcome aliens, this contingent of Japanese Americans--one in four U.S.-born Nisei--came in search of better lives but instead encountered a world shaped by increasingly volatile relations between the U.S. and Japan. Based on transnational and bilingual research in the United States and Japan, Michael R. Jin recuperates the stories of this unique group of American emigrants at the crossroads of U.S. and Japanese empire. From the Jim Crow American West to the Japanese colonial frontiers in Asia, and from internment camps in America to Hiroshima on the eve of the atomic bombing, these individuals redefined ideas about home, identity, citizenship, and belonging as they encountered multiple social realities on both sides of the Pacific. Citizens, Immigrants, and the Stateless examines the deeply intertwined histories of Asian exclusion in the United States, Japanese colonialism in Asia, and volatile geopolitical changes in the Pacific world that converged in the lives of Japanese American migrants.

This book identifies the rights of stateless people and outlines the major legal obstacles preventing the eradication of statelessness.

This study of citizenship and migration policies in the Gulf shows how temporary residency can become a permanent citizenship status.

What does it mean to be a citizen? In depth research with a stateless population in Bangladesh has revealed that, despite liberal theory’s reductive vision, the limits of political community are not set in stone. The Urdu-speaking population in Bangladesh exemplify some of the key problems facing uprooted populations and their experience provides insights into the long term unintended consequences of major historical events. Set in a site of camp and non-camp based displacement, it illustrates the nuances of political identity and lived spaces of statelessness that Western political theory has too long hidden from view. Using Bangladesh as a case study, Statelessness and Citizenship: Camps and the creation of political space argues that the crude binary oppositions of statelessness and citizenship are no longer relevant. Access to and understandings of citizenship are not just jurally but socially, spatially and temporally produced. Unpicking Agamben’s distinction between ‘political beings’ and ‘bare life’, the book considers experiences of citizenship through the camp as a social form. The camps of Bangladesh do not function as bounded physical or conceptual spaces in which denationalized groups are altogether divorced from the polity. Instead, citizenship is claimed at the level of everyday life, as the moments in which formal status is transgressed. Moreover, once in possession of ‘formal status’ internal borders within the nation-state render ‘rights-bearing citizens’ effectively ‘stateless’, and the experience of ‘citizens’ is very often equally uneven. While ‘statelessness’ may function as a cold instrument of exclusion, certainly, it is neither fixed nor static; just as citizenship is neither as stable nor benign as the dichotomy would suggest. Using these insights, the book develops the concept of ‘political space’ – an analysis of the way history and space inform the identities and political subjectivity available to people. In doing so, it provides an analytic approach of relevance to wider problems of displacement, citizenship and ethnic relations. Shortlisted for this year’s BSA Philip Abrams Memorial Prize.

Sixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, an exiled Jew deprived of her German citizenship, observed that before people can enjoy any of the "inalienable" Rights of Man-before there can be any specific rights to education, work, voting, and so on-there must first be such a thing as "the right to have rights". The concept received little attention at the time, but in our age of mass deportations, Muslim bans, refugee crises, and extra-state war, the phrase has become the centre of a crucial and lively debate. Here five leading thinkers from varied disciplines-including history, law, politics, and literary studies-discuss the critical basis of rights and the meaning of radical democratic politics today.