Throughout much of the twentieth century, these questions plagued a generation of legal thinkers and political philosophers, who were determined to regulate against the phenomenon of statelessness. Mira L. Siegelberg does a thorough job of recounting their main theories and debates against the historical backdrop of the collapse of empire, the rise of the modern nation state, the catastrophe of genocide, and the displacement of millions following both world wars. Many of her protagonists had witnessed these events firsthand. (Hannah Arendt, whose influential contributions to the field are often assumed to be the first, ranks here as one of the later additions to the field.) Most of them, perhaps not surprisingly, were Jewish and Russian. As the Moscow-born émigré Mark Vishniak observed in 1933, ‘it is very natural that the question of regulating the judicial situation of the stateless has been, in numerous cases, taken up by those who have suffered most from the absence of rights’.

It was not until after World War II that statelessness was codified in international law, in tandem with the rise of the nation state as the dominant form of political organisation, with sole legitimacy in the post-imperial international order. But, as Siegelberg’s book makes clear, this was only one of a number of scenarios that earlier architects and visionaries of international law and order imagined was possible. Statelessness joins a number of other titles that have recently demonstrated just how late the conceptual and legal borders of our political world map were drawn. It was not until the 1960s that alternative visions of political organisation, including extraterritorial enclaves, dominions, protectorates, federations, and city-states, were largely discarded in favour of a homogenous world order premised on the equality of states.

The first official recognition of statelessness in Western thought dates to the court case of Stoeck v. Public Trustee in 1921. Max Stoeck was a businessman who had left Prussia in 1896 to manage a German business in London that manufactured electric lamps. In ways we might recognise today, Stoeck saw himself as an entrepreneur, unburdened by the restrictions of nationality that sought to impede the free flow of capital across borders. After war broke out in 1914, Stoeck suddenly found himself transformed from cosmopolitan businessman to enemy alien, and eventually, to a stateless person. As Siegelberg explains, Stoeck v. Public Trustee reaffirmed Stoeck’s claim that, since he had lost his legal connection to the German empire years before and had never been naturalised in Britain, he was now a person of ‘no nationality’.

This decision transformed questions of legal personhood, statehood, and rights in international law. As Siegelberg shows, by shining a light on the evolving role of statelessness as a category in legal thought, it is possible to trace the bigger theme of the evolution of international law, hinged by politics, policy, and activism. By 1954 and then the 1961 UN Conventions on the Reduction of Statelessness, the position of individuals as bearers of universal ‘human rights’, including the right to possess a nationality, was entrenched, though, as Siegelberg’s analysis demonstrates, those rights were vested primarily in the sovereign power of the state. This also included the power of states to strip people of their rights to citizenship or to deny them naturalisation. This was a disappointment to those who had hoped to create a stronger international order in which rights would be guaranteed to all individuals, regardless of one’s membership of a state. It also meant that millions of post-imperial subjects of the crumbling British and French empires were left stranded in the postwar period of decolonisation, as newly independent states refused to recognise minorities displaced within their borders.

The stateless are not refugees under international law, though they can often become so. In the past fifty years, refugees have become the primary objects of both humanitarian concern and public anxiety, largely obscuring the issue of statelessness from world attention. But at least twelve million people spend their lives never leaving the places where they were born, and yet do not possess any of the rights of legal residency their fellow citizens do, including birth certificates or passports. The Rohingya of Myanmar, the Roma of the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, the Karana in Madagascar, the Pemba and Makonde of Kenya – these are just some of the minorities that experience the full burden of living without papers, severely hampering access to education, legal employment, health care, the right to vote, the right to own a home, and freedom of movement. These are the modern-day equivalent of Joseph Roth’s ‘wandering Jews’, ‘condemned to rootlessness and unable to budge’. Meanwhile, the international organisations that once promised solidarity and the protection of the vulnerable beyond the boundaries of the state are increasingly powerless. In the past half century, the earlier hopes that international legal norms could be developed and strengthened to protect individuals against the power of the state are no longer realistic. Instead, in recent years we have witnessed an unprecedented hardening of borders and state powers for the poor and the disenfranchised, while the fantasy of a globalised borderless world remains the prerogative of the wealthy and the few.

This is not a book about the experience of statelessness – that would be another book. Statelessness concerns the ways in which international lawyers and political scientists have responded to the modern phenomenon of exclusion and displacement that characterised much of the twentieth century and that forced new ways of thinking about the role of borders and boundaries of membership. Now we face a new challenge, as the climate crisis deepens and a global pandemic tests the resilience of national governments and the capacity of the international community to contain or respond to them. Perhaps optimistically, Siegelberg ends her book on a note of hope. If we wish to remain a ‘world of states’, we need a new vocabulary and framework of ideas to comprehend and manage these challenges, rather than relying on the doctrines and institutions that were created by intellectuals of a different era for a different time.