Nationalism Law And Statelessness

In 1998 a bloody war erupted in The Horn of Africa between Ethiopia and Eritrea. During the war Ethiopia arrested and expelled 70,000 of its citizens, and stripped another 50,000-plus of their citzenship on the basis of their presumed ethnicity. Nationalism, Law and Statelessness: Grand Illusions in the Horn of Africa examines the events which led up to the war, documents the expulsions and denationalisations that took place and follows the flight of these stateless Ethiopians out of the Horn into Europe. The core issue examined is the link between sovereignty and statelessness as this plays out in The Horn of Africa and in the West. The book provides a valuable insight into how nations create and perpetuate statelessness, the failure of law, both national and international, to protect and address the plight of stateless persons, and the illusory nature of nationalism, citizenship and human rights in the modern age. The study is one of a very few which examines the problem of statelessness through the accounts of stateless persons themselves. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers in anthropology, law, politics, African studies and refugee studies as well as professionals and all those interested in stateless persons in the West, including Eritreans, who continue to be denied basic rights.

Statelessness remains an issue of concern in Europe. Stateless persons often experience problems with accessing basic rights, despite the proclamation of human rights and a right to a nationality for all. Various attempts have been made to address the issue of statelessness, for instance through the adoption of the United Nations Statelessness Conventions, but also by European regional cooperation mechanisms. This book analyses and places into context the legal approaches that states have taken together in the context of the Council of Europe and the European Union to prevent and solve statelessness from a human rights perspective.

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.

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

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.