Description
When one lacks citizenship and is stateless, one is denied a formal identity, left in a legal no-man’s land, formally excluded from society (Staples, 2007). State registration and the introduction of citizenship documents are cited by international organisations to be the solution to statelessness: Action 8 of the UNHCR Global Action Plan to end statelessness, to “issue nationality documentation to those with entitlement to it” (2014, 26) and the UN SDG 16.9 “legal identity for all”. However, as identified by Brinham “documents do not merely prevent and reduce statelessness; they also produce and reproduce it in multiple ways” (2019, 168). Documents not only relate to whether people are seen or unseen, but how and for what purpose (Brinham, 2019), “lead[ing] to both entitlement and deprivation, security and insecurity, empowerment and control, emancipation and repression” (Chhotray and McConnell, 2018, 118). This paper will explore the everyday administrative violence experienced by stateless persons before, during and after the process to legally regularise their status. This paper will identify the hostile borders encountered in their everyday lives and examine the simultaneous, contradictory affects of emancipation and repression instigated by identity documentation, challenging the view that state documentation provides a remedy to statelessness.
