Oral Histories of Statelessness

What is statelessness?

Statelessness is a description of a relationship between people and countries, or nation-states. To be stateless technically means that someone is not a citizen of any country. But in practice, it’s not quite as simple as that.

The international legal definition of statelessness is found in the 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons: Article 1 of the Convention explains that “For the purpose of this Convention, the term “stateless person” means a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law.”

Someone might be legally stateless (or de jure stateless), while some other people might be de facto stateless – meaning that they have a nationality but it does not offer them protection or the full rights normally offered by citizenship. Still others might have citizenship somewhere but they reject that citizenship and consider themselves to be stateless; others might consider themselves stateless because they have citizenship somewhere but they do not have a citizenship which aligns with their national identity or claims for self-determination. So, while the international legal definition of statelessness gives the State the authority to claim or reject someone as a national, in this project we meet people who claim or reject states themselves.

In the interviews held here, we’ll see many different understandings and experiences of statelessness expressed by interviewees. We’ll learn about how statelessness and its experiences and effects does not begin and end with citizenship.