Associate Professor Samantha Balaton-Chrimes

Overview

Samantha Balaton-Chrimes is an Associate Professor in Politics at Deakin University (Melbourne, Australia).

Sam has worked on statelessness since 2009 when she conducted doctoral research in Kenya. Since then, she has conducted research on various ways in which statelessness is produced by combinations of bureaucracy and discrimination. She investigates the practical avenues for remedying statelessness and the underlying marginalisation that causes it.

One strand of her research concerns communities who are rendered stateless ‘at home’ because of identity-based discrimination, whether in law or bureaucratic practice. This work is concerned with enduring political questions about how difference and identity are negotiated in political communities, particularly postcolonial ones. As part of this program of work, Sam has published widely on the role of ethnoracial classification and the politics of division, pluralism and nation-making.

A second strand of her research concerns bureaucratic procedures and their role in the manufacturing of statelessness. In this work Sam investigates the fine-grained mechanics of identity cards, population registers, birth registration, nationality and statelessness determination procedures to see how bureaucracy gives effect – or not – to legal protections.

Sam’s 2026 book Knowing Ethnicity: The Politics of Classification and Pluralism in Kenya (Cambridge University Press) straddles both these areas of research into statelessness and its root causes.

She has particular expertise in statelessness and marginalisation in Africa, and conducts comparative work with other postcolonial settings, including Australia. She has consulted for UNHCR, and she is the author of the book ‘Ethnicity, Democracy and Citizenship in Africa: The Political Marginalisation of Kenya’s Nubians’, and numerous articles about citizenship, identity and recognition in Kenya and beyond.