they were stripped of citizenship ([1948] 2004, 353–54, 365, 577), often on political grounds, not because they were born into statelessness, as occurs in The Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere today.
Second, also in contrast to the present era, statelessness was associated with border-crossings. The stateless were arrivals from elsewhere (Arendt ([1948] 2004, 341, 352, 356) and therefore had a country of origin: “Nonrecognition of statelessness always means repatriation, i.e., deportation to a country of origin” (355). As I illustrate in this book, however, the stateless today do not necessarily have a country of origin to which to be deported and the majority do not cross international borders to escape persecution.
Third, loss of citizenship entailed the loss of rights: the right to a home (Arendt ([1948] 2004, 372), the right to government protection and a legal status (373, 577), the right to an identity (364–65), the right to belong to a community (375, 377) and, in some instances, the right to life (375). Without citizenship, they “lost all other qualities and specific relationships—except that they were still human” (380).5 Of all the rights violations that the stateless suffered during this time, Arendt felt that the loss of a community to which to belong was the gravest, as it led to the deprivation of all other rights. “The calamity of the rightless is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion … but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever” (375).
As noted in Chapter 1, Arendt consequently insisted on the “right to have rights,” which comprised the “right to belong to some kind of organized community” where one’s opinion and actions mattered and one’s rights could be guaranteed (376, 377). It was because Arendt believed that human rights rested not on some sort of inherent human dignity,6 but rather on belonging as an equal to a political community,7 she insisted that “man as man has only one right that transcends his various rights as a citizen: the right never to be excluded from the rights granted by his community” (628).
While much has changed since Arendt wrote The Origins of Totalitarianism more than sixty years ago—human rights have become part and parcel of international and local discourses, many governments incorporate such rights into their legislation and policies, and UNHCR has taken on the mandate of preventing and reducing statelessness globally—statelessness persists. UNHCR’s Statistical Online Population Database has data on just over 3.49 million stateless people in seventy states (UNHCR 2015b), but the agency estimates that more than ten million people are de jure stateless worldwide (2012b). It admits, however, that it has a “tough task determining the true number of stateless people” (2012b n. pag.) and others surmise that the problem of “de jure statelessness is overshadowed by an even greater crisis of de facto statelessness” (Adjami and Harrington 2008, 107).
UNHCR defines de facto stateless persons as those who are “outside the country of their nationality who are unable or, for valid reasons, are unwilling to avail themselves of the protection of that country” (Massey 2010, 61). Other perspectives exist, however. For instance, in some cases de facto statelessness is described as the condition of being unable to prove one’s nationality. This may result because an individual’s birth is never registered, or because he or she is an undocumented migrant or a trafficked person, or because identity documents are purposely destroyed.8 In other cases, de facto statelessness is defined as the lack of “effective” citizenship, which can mean a lack of government protection9 or the inability to enjoy rights.10 Additionally, in the more recent climate change work on statelessness, UNHCR asserts that those people who lose their state of citizenship due to rising sea levels could be rendered de facto stateless (Park 2011, 14).11 The number of stateless persons, de jure and de facto, therefore, may be very high globally at present (and in the future).
Although I focus on the Caribbean in this book, stateless people are found in all areas of the world: from Central Asia to Western Europe and the African Great Lakes. The majority of stateless persons are found in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and South and South East Asia, however (see Figure 1). The number of known stateless populations in these latter areas ranges from hundreds of thousands to millions and includes individuals of Russian descent in Estonia and Latvia, certain national minorities in the Russian Federation, Bidoon in Kuwait,12 Palestinians in Syria and Lebanon, highland tribes in Thailand, Rohingya13 in Myanmar, and Lhotshampas in Bhutan, among others.14 Figure 1, which does not capture the stateless populations in states for which data are unavailable (such as Australia, The Bahamas, Canada, or South Africa), presents the scope of UNHCR’s known stateless populations.
Causes of Statelessness
When statelessness became a prominent international concern during the World War II era, it was in the context of geopolitical upheaval, war, and genocide. Groups of people, once recognized as nationals of a given state, were stripped of their citizenship, often on a discriminatory basis. Statelessness as a result of arbitrary denationalization policies did not vanish when the war ended or when the UDHR proclaimed in Article 15 that everyone has a right to a nationality and not to be arbitrarily deprived of it, however. In fact, the “Deprivation or denial of nationality based on discriminatory practices, particularly against racial, ethnic or religious minorities … is perhaps the most important cause of statelessness worldwide” today (Manly 2007, 256). In Chapters 3 and 4, I explain how statelessness is generated on these grounds in the specific contexts of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic.
Figure 1. De jure statelessness, 2012. Migration Policy Institute Data Hub, 2015.
Many of those who are denied or deprived of citizenship on discriminatory grounds are found in democratizing regimes or in newly formed states that are still in the process of nation building. For example, democratization has had the “effect of triggering an obsession with belonging” in Africa (Geschiere 2009, 6). Consequently, from Côte d’Ivoire and Cameroon to Zambia and Zimbabwe, people have been turned into “foreigners” in their own country because they are not deemed “autochthonous” to the state.15 The process of denationalizing citizens often occurs around election time. Thus, in Cameroon, “Belonging has become a choice weapon for manipulating elections” (52). The NGO Citizenship Rights in Africa, a group that seeks to end statelessness on the continent, records how black Africans in Mauritania, Nubians in Kenya, and various groups in Côte d’Ivoire have been denationalized around election time because they represent political competition.16 Similarly, OSJI observed that “the advent of multi-party democracy in many African States in the 1990s heightened the political significance of distinguishing citizens from noncitizens, and led to a marked increase in attempts to denationalise political opponents or even entire ethnic and social groups” (cited in Kanengoni 2008, 4).17
Statelessness can also be “a by-product of entrenched discrimination and social exclusion,” which is “often closely related to incomplete nation-building” (Manly 2007, 257). Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan observe that democratizing or transitioning regimes often suffer from a “stateness” problem. That is, regimes that are attempting to leave behind a previous authoritarian structure often face a crisis wherein “profound differences about what should actually constitute the polity (or political community) and which demos or demoi (population or populations) should be members of that political community” become problematic (Linz and Stepan 1996, 16). When “profound differences” exist “as to who has the right of citizenship in that state … a ‘stateness’ problem” occurs (16).
The
