Statelessness and the organisation of humanity

June 2026

In this blog, Kelly Staples (Associate Professor of International Politics, University of Leicester) argues that the drive to ‘complete the organisation of humanity’, and the recourse to a type of legal fiction in the attempt to do so continue apace in attempts to reduce or eliminate statelessness. She suggests that considering the fictitious aspects of the organisation of humanity through legal personhood reveals not only the power – but also the limits – of these practices.

I am thankful to the editors of this blog for allowing me the opportunity to reflect on how I try to approach statelessness in my work on the occasion of the publication of my 2012 book in paperback this month. I first became interested in statelessness in the early 2000s, as a PhD student in Politics at the University of Manchester in the north of England. I had become engrossed in the political theory that abounded at the time, much of which – in the optimistic heyday of the immediate post-Cold War in the West – promised cosmopolitan re-imaginings of community. This, coupled with a background interest in anarchist praxis, gradually led me into my studies in statelessness, and into thinking about subjectivity beyond the state. More recently, Tendayi Bloom’s work on noncitizenship has helped me to think about institutional structures from the perspective of those who must live and act politically despite them.

I initially came to statelessness, then, out of an interest in testing the limits of the theories of global justice I was encountering as a graduate student. It seemed to me that the theoretical work I was reading largely either ignored statelessness, or treated it in ways that reified the structures conditioning its inevitability. Either way, this seemed problematic. I also found myself torn between the daring abstraction of many of the cosmopolitan theories imagining away the state, and the more pragmatic approaches to global ethics acknowledging the importance of ‘starting points which are available and reasons which are convincing’. I spent a long time during my PhD, and when writing the book that came out of it, thinking about the extent to which ‘the world was too much with us’ in our attempts to re-imagine personhood, and wondering how much to keep the world – for better or worse – with us when trying to re-imagine the scope and limits of political community.

In navigating this question, I was closely influenced by works in international political theory and global ethics, especially those that productively engaged contingency. Authors in international political theory, in particular Mervyn Frost and Molly Cochran helped me in my attempts to make sense of the space between confidently declaring or asserting the existence of fundamental human rights and despairingly taking the world with all of its sovereign exclusions just as we find it. Their work helped me in trying to understand what the outer limits of the organisation of relations between individual humans and politico-legal institutions could tell us about those institutions. The answers to questions of citizenship are often easy, but when they are not, they reveal important things about personhood in world politics. Looking at statelessness reveals the present limits to legal personhood for human beings. However, it also demonstrates the contingency of those limits, and the potential for personhood to be practiced otherwise.

My earliest influences in thinking through the ‘limit concept’ of statelessness itself were two of the first (and still, perhaps, best) authors in statelessness studies: Paul Weis and Hannah Arendt. In Arendt’s case, I kept (and keep) coming back to the claim that: ‘only with a completely organised humanity could the loss of home and political status become identical with expulsion from humanity altogether’. This warning keeps us sensitive to the limits of attempts to completely organise humanity, as well as their tendency to heighten the risks of being on the outside. I have always read the word ‘could’ in this quote with an implied emphasis to remind me that while this is a grave risk, it is not an inevitability. Indeed, recent work aligned with the CSS Project provides reason for a degree of cautious optimism about the human agency of stateless people and noncitizens in navigating life within and against the state system.

In Weis’s case, I have not been able to forget his conception of ‘legal fiction’. A prominent and pioneering international lawyer, himself (like Arendt) affected by statelessness, Weis recognised the risks of fictitiously attributing a nationality to a person by applying any law other than the law of the state in question. He argued persuasively that even when it is unlawful, a state decision rendering someone stateless can be valid. Although international law has changed dramatically since the 1950s, customary international law still follows this rule, and – in practice – it has often been problematic for other states or international bodies to resort to legal fiction even in good faith. In spite of the continuing attempts of global governance actors to complete the organisation of humanity through the reduction, or even elimination, of statelessness, it remains necessary therefore to recognise the existence of stateless persons.

Taken together, Arendt and Weis provide some important conditions for responding to statelessness. They caution us to look critically at attempts to reduce statelessness driven by the imperative to completing the organisation of humanity including via recourse to legal fiction. These forms of governance can drive the administration of ‘personality’ or ‘personhood’ in ways that do not address what is really at stake in it for human beings. Arendt and Weis are ever-present reminders to consider the power of the international rules that have come to organise the status of individual human beings, as well as their implications when in question. These rules make statelessness possible and problematic, exacerbate its exclusionary character, and can incentivise hollow and disempowering solutions. Their fundamental role in constituting statehood sustain sovereignty – even if this produces ‘quasi-states’ and a system of ‘organized hypocrisy’, and are a powerful part of the organisation of humans as persons.

In recent years, as readers of this blog will well know, there has been a growing understanding of the importance not only of the letter of the nationality laws of the relevant state or states, but also of the limits, practical operation and discretionary dimensions of law. Research conducted by my own PhD students has examined the applications of sovereign decision power (and power to define the exception) at the micro-level including through the decisions of local bureaucrats. International Relations scholarship more generally has also recently benefited from concepts like ‘circuitry’ to connect ‘the everyday and the hyper-local to the national, international [… and] transnational’. Such approaches certainly complicate our understandings of the meaningful potential for life, liberty, and security of person of particular human beings, but they also open space therefore for nuance, and for hope against abjection.

As one reviewer of my book noted, I could only provide ‘very limited evidence in support of [… my] claim that stateless people can exercise political agency’. This is a fair point, and I think that only the kind of continuing interdisciplinary (not divorced either from the reality of lived statelessness) work called for by the Critical Statelessness Studies Project will help as we continue to challenge hegemonic narratives of abstract universalism, and of state sovereignty. The politico-legal drive to complete the organisation of humanity, and the recourse to fiction in the attempt to do so continue apace (see, for example, recent UN agendas on ‘legal identity for all’ and ‘leaving no one behind’. Critical approaches to statelessness can help us understand the scope, as well as the limits, of legal personhood, both now and as it might otherwise be imagined and practices.

Retheorising Statelessness: Towards a background theory of membership in world politics (Edinburgh University Press) is now available in paperback. Use discount code PAPER30 for a 30% off on the EUP website.

_{Image by Lucas K on Unsplash}