Born Without a Country

JSTOR Daily takes a long look at statelessness — the condition of people whom no country recognizes as citizens, leaving them, in Hannah Arendt's famous phrase, without the right to have rights. The piece reports that in Southeast Asia alone, hundreds of thousands of people may be affected, many of them ethnic minorities living in the country where they were born, from ethnic Vietnamese in Cambodia to Rohingya from Myanmar. Researchers quoted by JSTOR Daily trace much of the problem to colonial-era borders and citizenship rules, along with poor birth registration that leaves people unable to prove their parentage. Without a nationality, the stateless are especially exposed to trafficking, forced marriage, and exploitation, and are often criminalized as illegal migrants. The scholarship it cites frames statelessness less as an administrative oversight than as a consequence of how states decide who belongs.

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