This chapter explores denationalization, focusing on Indonesian foreign terrorist fighters (FTFs). Post-9/11 and during the Arab Spring, Western democracies tightened border control to combat terrorism, enabling the stripping of citizenship from involved individuals. Denationalization, via law or public-authority decisions, emerged as a contentious counter-terrorism tool. Indonesia, as a Muslim-majority Southeast Asian nation, partially embraced denationalization, refusing to repatriate Indonesian FTFs. This aligns with global security concerns but raises statelessness questions. The chapter examines denationalization’s legal framework, international obligations, and the blurred line between de jure and de facto statelessness. Critics argue that disproportionately applying denationalization to Muslims undermines human rights, inter-state cooperation and international justice. Refusal to repatriate Indonesian FTFs raises concerns about long-term consequences and due process. Understanding denationalization nuances is vital, considering its impact on the citizenship rights of individuals involved in terrorism.

This chapter explores the impact of conflict on the issue of statelessness in Asia using a case study centred on the Kuomingtang (KMT) soldiers and their descendants in northern Thailand. The case study examines the historical background of the KMT Secret Army and conducts legal and policy analysis on relevant countries including the People’s Republic of China (PRC), the Republic of China (RoC) and Thailand. These analyses shed light on how the group became stateless. The chapter scrutinizes the nationality laws of each country linked to the case study and the practical implementation of these laws and offers observations on the statelessness phenomenon. The case study demonstrates that violent conflicts may lead to de jure statelessness or place people at risk of statelessness due to the loss of a sense of national belonging and legal identity documents as by-products of violent conflict; that (re)gaining citizenship of a country might not be easy as relevant laws change and the operation of laws become too difficult for vulnerable groups to manage; and that the long-lasting political consequences of conflict continue to influence state practice in the case of both PRC and RoC, regardless of the group’s rights under their respective nationality laws.

Unlike many core human rights treaties, the Statelessness Conventions are among the most poorly ratified in the world. Orthodox scholarship on human rights treaties primarily focuses on post-ratification implementation and their impact on state conduct. While it is important to examine post-ratification compliance, understanding why states agree to ratify human rights treaties is as crucial. Ratification nudges states towards better human rights practices and serves as a gateway for the implementation of international norms. This chapter addresses this gap in scholarship by examining the ratification status of the Statelessness Conventions and the ratification process of the 1954 Statelessness Convention, together with key actors and their influence, by the Philippines, Southeast Asia’s first State Party to the treaty, and its subsequent accession to the 1961 Reduction of Statelessness Convention. Both rationalist and non-rationalist explanations account for ratifications. While rational explanations push states to ratify treaties, socializing liberal and constructivist-oriented explanations, for example, also drive states to commit to treaties. Multi-dimensional and multi-perspectival orientations should therefore inform how and why ratification or accession campaigns should be undertaken, and perhaps, even how treaties themselves should be designed. This analysis serves as a basis for broader theoretical reflections on persuading states to ratify human rights treaties.

This chapter explores the synergies, limitations, and challenges of addressing statelessness through human rights and development approaches, using the Hill Country Tamils of Sri Lanka as a case study. In addressing the legacy of statelessness, both the human rights and development frameworks must be drawn on and used simultaneously. However, a frameworks approach alone falls short in addressing statelessness, given the political, economic and societal factors that perpetuate discrimination. Instead, as the case of the Hill Country Tamils demonstrates, both human rights and development approaches must be underpinned by a deeper commitment to pursuing equality and combatting discrimination at large. Despite claims of success, the legacy of statelessness in Sri Lanka still lingers. The Hill Country Tamils are still among the ‘furthest behind’ in Sri Lanka and continue to experience severe discrimination well after securing formal citizenship. The community’s prolonged statelessness has led to long-term deterioration in human rights conditions, such that a grant of formal citizenship alone is inadequate to address structural drivers of disadvantage that the community continues to endure.

The lack of citizenship or statelessness may be brought about by action, misaction and inaction of not only the state but the society in the country as well. The state and society often join hands in depriving a community of citizenship and, in so doing, both parties may act legally and extra-legally against recognizing and giving identity documentation to the community in question, again according to the text of the law, its implementation, or both. The society in question may opt to return citizenship to the same community and encourage the state or state-like entities to implement it. This chapter discusses the situation of the Rohingyas during the political transition in Myanmar (from 2011 to 2020) when the state and society joined hands in legally, extralegally, and/or socially depriving the Rohingyas of citizenship and identity documentation and arbitrarily implementing and mis-implementing the Myanmar Citizenship Law. The main part of the chapter traces the Rohingya moment during the Myanmar Spring (February 2021) and discusses four positive developments in the situation of the Rohingyas after the February 1, 2021 coup, concluding with a caution and some suggestions for the way ahead.

While statelessness remains a global phenomenon, it is a global issue with an Asian epicentre. This chapter situates the book within the context and multi-disciplinary scholarship on statelessness in Asia by reviewing the causes, conditions and/or challenges of statelessness. It recognizes statelessness in this region as a phenomenon beyond forced migration and highlights the arbitrary and discriminatory use of state power in producing and sustaining statelessness. The chapter reviews the ‘state of statelessness’ in Asia, including applicable international, regional and national legal frameworks. It also maps some of the core themes that emerge from the contributors’ examination of the causes and conditions of statelessness in Asia. These include: the relationship between ethnic, religious, cultural and linguistic diversity and statelessness; the legacies of colonialism; contemporary politics surrounding nation-building, border regimes and mobilities; as well as intersecting vulnerabilities. The chapter concludes with some preliminary thoughts on frameworks of analysis and future research agendas, including challenges and prospects for reform.

This chapter discusses the 1953 legal challenge to Ceylon’s (present-day Sri Lanka) voter registration laws before the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London, one of the first against domestic legislation on citizenship from a former British colony. The Kodakan Pillai appeal, as the case was known, was part of multiple challenges to the immigration, nationality and citizenship regime in Ceylon at the time which discriminated against people who had migrated to Ceylon from India but had permanently settled there for multiple generations. The appeal ultimately failed, and the malaiyaha thamilar – plantation laborers and their descendants – form part of minority populations in Sri Lanka today, stigmatized as ‘migrants’ and outsiders, frequently lacking documentation and evidence of citizenship, and consequently, to land ownership or welfare benefits. Drawing on a rich legal archive of citizenship applications filed before the Commission for Indian and Pakistani Residents in the 1950s, alongside the Kodakan Pillai appeal, this chapter serves as an illustration for why the legal history of statelessness in Asia is important. Given this historical context, it also cautions against solutions to statelessness in the region that solely rely on improved documentation of political belonging.

Chapter 4 gives an account of the role of repertoire and travel in German public theatre and how the Theater an der Ruhr works against national understandings of canonised theatrical repertoires. It examines why German repertoire theatres do not discard plays after a season but reperform them for years, even decades, and what consequences this has for actors and their self-cultivation, as well as for the building of an ethico-aesthetic tradition in an institution. This system goes hand in hand with the closely knit notion of the ensemble in German theatre. This chapter explores these notions through a case study of the transnational repertoire of the Theater an der Ruhr and their long-term collaborations with international theatre-makers from precarious parts of the world, known as the ‘international theaterlandscapes project’. I accompanied the Theater’s journey to Algeria and witnessed first-hand their cooperation with Algerian and Tunisian artists after the ‘Arab spring’, focusing on the way in which theatre develops forms of transnational diplomacy and troubles national narratives of cultural heritage.

While the National Socialists made a concerted effort to harness the emigrant nation wherever its members might be, they had no more success outside their areas of conquest than had previous regimes. In some ways, they had less. Moreover, their efforts to replace an inclusive notion of German cultural community with a racially exclusive one ultimately undermined Germans’ positions in other countries even more than the events of World War I. Those efforts within Europe also exposed the degree to which Germanness continued to be defined by its aggregate character even under their auspices.Their notion of the Volksgemeinschaft was defined more by its exclusions than its inclusions. The striking ways in which that fell short outside of Europe underscore the varieties of ways in which Germanness continued to be defined and performed abroad during the period of the war and the degree to which Germans’ fates outside of Europe were contingent on the states in which they lived. Geopolitics played important roles in recasting notions of belonging during this period of crisis, much as it had during earlier ones.Nevertheless, older notions of belonging persisted during and after the war.

This chapter deals with Germany’s position on individuals, human rights and international criminal responsibility. It is in seven parts: position of individuals; human rights; international refugee law; nationality and statelessness; international terrorism; international health law; and international criminal law. The second part covers the Federal Constitutional Court rejecting the Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities’ interpretation of the CRPD; Germany’s criticism of Brunei’s Sharia Penal Code as violating human rights and of Saudi Arabia for violating the CRC; Germany’s concern over possible human rights abuses in Xinjiang, China; the German Federal Government adopting its thirteenth human rights report; and candidates nominated by Germany for human rights bodies. The fourth part discusses an amendment to the Nationality Act depriving members of terrorist militias with dual nationality of their German citizenship. The seventh part deals with the resignation of the German judge from the International Residual Mechanism for Criminal Tribunals; Germany requesting Lebanon to extradite a Syrian official; German charges brought against Syrian officials for crimes against humanity and against a member of ‘Islamic State’ for war crimes; rulings on war crimes against property; and Germany’s view on possible crimes against humanity and war crimes and genocide in Myanmar.

This chapter examines life along the border from the era of the American Occupation through the rise of the Trujillo regime in 1930. It reconstructs the period from the testimonies of ethnic Haitian detainees. Analysis of court and police records from the period demonstrate a stark difference between enforcement in the decades of the 1920s and the 1930s. The year 1930 was a watershed. In 1930 Dominican-born ethnic Haitians were first systematically deported to Haiti and forced to pay for immigration permits. Executive Order 372, a racialized migration law introduced during the US occupation, played a crucial role in the process by which all ethnic Haitians became classified as foreigners. Through the evolving use of this law, ethnic Haitians who had previously been recognized as citizens, property owners and legal residents in Dominican territory were deported to Haiti. Others remained in Dominican territory, but in 1930, for the first time, people born on Dominican territory were reclassified as foreigners and they were forced to pay immigration tax. Far from a harmonious, bicultural border, the chapter illuminates the increasingly vulnerable legal status of ethnic Haitians through exploring systematic deportation, imprisonment, punitive taxation, lost citizenship, lost property, and displacement prior to the genocide.

One problem complicating the task of humanitarian protection is the quality of data on the populations most affected. If protection agencies cannot identify those who need help, then their ambitions are unlikely to be realized. This is especially relevant when considering “invisible,” hard-to-reach, or historically marginalized groups such as stateless people for whom we have little baseline data. Undercounting is often a political matter. Who is counted also tells us about governmental and institutional priorities and exposes biases about what counts, and the ways in which resources should be allocated. This chapter presents a critical review of how statelessness has been underestimated by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and its partners. It argues that the process of undercounting is indicative of a revisionist turn in humanitarian management characterized by a fixation with numbers and “results.” The ways in which the UNHCR data are presented reflects an increasingly top-down logic that ignores the lived experience of stateless people and does little to advance the cause of humanitarian protection.

Citizenship is not a neutral and stable status upon which to base rights, freedoms, and protections. It is also not a status available to all. As this chapter illustrates, citizenship is precarious and has never been a secure foundation upon which to base human rights. In the securitized world of the twenty-first century, this instability has heightened, especially for minorities. To make this argument, the chapter is divided into three sections. The first section explains how citizenship arose in international practice and law and how states translated international practice into defined nationality laws in the domestic sphere. This section highlights how before citizenship became a status to which human rights attached, it was, first and foremost, an international ordering principle. The second section demonstrates how states have historically excluded various groups, typically minorities, from enjoyment of full citizenship status, thereby endangering said groups’ access to human rights. The third section provides contemporary examples of citizenship deprivation and denial, highlighting the myriad justifications that states use to deny and deprive people of citizenship.

This chapter defines noncitizens as those who must live out their lives despite the states with most power over their lives, and despite the international system of states. Such individuals may also be citizens. That is, noncitizenship and citizenship are not opposites. They are instead two modes of relating to a state. This chapter argues that those experiencing the world as noncitizens have special and specific claims deriving from the significant additional burden placed upon them by the functioning of the states with most power over their lives, and by the international system. In practice, the rights of those in a noncitizen relationship with a state are often overlooked. People are often asked to demonstrate some special relationship with a particular state even in order to access the most basic of human rights. Usually this relationship must either be citizenship or some approximation to citizenship. This chapter argues that citizenship is not the only way in which an individual can have a relationship with a state, and that noncitizenship also gives rise to special and specific claims. Individuals should not be forced to contort themselves into something citizen-like in order to be considered eligible for rights.

Although the presence of the Kurdish diaspora is relatively new in the European contexts, it has nonetheless developed as a transnational community, enabled and facilitated by global communication technologies that can be used to politically mobilize resources in support of the Kurds in the Middle East. What makes the Kurdish diaspora a politicized diaspora is the persistent exclusionary and violence of the states against the Kurds in Turkey, Iraq, Syria and Iran. It is during times of crisis and critical events that the Kurdish diaspora is materialized through its claims, lobbying and rallies across the West. Although migration can imply assimilation for many transnational communities, the Kurdish ambivalence vis-à-vis assimilation becomes tangible. It is also true that Kurds might be more receptive to assimilation due to their minoritized backgrounds in the country of origin and experiences of adaptation to the dominant culture and language. However, the political activism of diaspora and the strong attachment to Kurdish identity due to political oppression in the Middle East is a persistent reminder that Kurds have not come to the West to assimilate but to continue struggling for recognition of their identities and rights in the Middle East.