Abstract
ABSTRACTUNHCR's current #IBelong campaign presents stateless people as uniquely excluded, emphasizing the need for legal solutions to their situation. Such approaches to statelessness sidestep both the complexities of lived experience and the wider politics of state recognition. In response, this article utilizes ethnographic data from Sabah, Malaysia, and theorizations of the gray areas between citizenship and statelessness to argue for the fundamental connection between statelessness and irregularity. Such a connection is central to understanding both the everyday lives of potentially stateless people and Sabah's public discourse on statelessness as a mirage obscuring the problems of “illegals” and “street children.”
Highlights
UNHCR’s current #IBelong campaign presents stateless people as uniquely excluded, emphasizing the need for legal solutions to their situation
The article draws on fieldwork with the children of migrants and refugees in Sabah’s capital, Kota Kinabalu, and uses a twopronged analysis to explore the politics of recognition in the state
The article analyzes certain political debates and media discourses on stateless people in Sabah, exploring two factors that work against recognition: the presentation of statelessness as a nonissue and the assumption that stateless children are “street children.”
Summary
One explicit focus of current UNHCR campaigns is to have more states become parties to the 1954 and the 1961 Conventions on Statelessness (UNHCR, 2014a, pp. 23–24). Arendt’s move to put the noncitizen at the center of political thought remains powerful, more recent work on statelessness and citizenship questions the picture of pure exclusion that she presents and that seems so influential in current UNHCR campaigns. In her subtle analysis of the situation of “Urdu-speakers” living in camp and noncamp situations in Bangladesh, Redclift questions the utility of abstract oppositions of “statelessness” and “citizenship.” Statelessness, Redclift argues, cannot be reduced to “a singular, or discrete, legal or social form” and does not tell a story “solely of exclusion” Even former refugees, who were issued with a temporary pass known as IMM13 and are categorized by UNHCR as “people of concern,” may find their families slipping into irregularity (Kassim, 2009, p. 69)
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