Modern statelessness and the British imperial perspective. A comment on Mira Siegelberg’s Statelessness: A Modern History

Abstract

ABSTRACT If the link between territories and people get severed, what is (or should be) the role of international law and the international community? In Statelessness. A Modern History, Mira Siegelberg (University of Cambridge) guides the reader through the answers jurists, philosophers, and diplomats have given to that question since the nineteenth century. Siegelberg is less interested in the question why the postwar arrangement failed so miserably in its plea to reduce statelessness than in the architecture of international law and its role in the debate about legal identity. Her choice of subject is one few historians have touched upon and her work is a corrective to the dominant understanding that international law did not concern itself with the plight of the stateless until after the Second World War. However, her overemphasis on legal scholars from the former Central European empires obscures the role of British ideas about and contributions to international law, legal identity, and the role of the state that might prove crucial to understand modern statelessness that emerged at the dissolution of colonial empires. Nevertheless, Siegelberg's brilliant and important book will likely form the start of a conversation on a topic that merits further historical investigation.