Statelessness: A Radical Rethinking of the Dominant Citizenism Paradigm

A new approach to statelessness has emerged in the literature on the topic. Taking citizenism as a starting point and pioneered by Swider and Bloom, this approach offers a completely fresh paradigm for studying and understanding the statelesseness phenomenon. In the contemporary global context where citizenships are deeply unequal and racialized, the focus on rights invites us to dismiss the baseless presumption that fighting statelessness is always in the interests of the populations concerned, let alone that it is directly connected to the protection of human and citizenship rights. It is the world’s inequitable neo-feudal citizenism arrangement that is a problem, not the fact that some people do not fit neatly into the citizenism hierarchy and find themselves in a position of statelessness. Shedding light on the role of citizenship and statelessness in the world today as tools of preservation of racialized hierarchies and inequitable exclusion of most of the world’s population from rights at home and abroad, the new scholarship questions the UN High Commissioner for Refugees’s mission and actions in this domain and takes issue with the self-serving parochialism of dominant Western citizenship and statelessness literatures.