Who counts as a stateless person? Nation-statist logics and the liabilities of potential citizenship elsewhere

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article examines how the definition of statelessness is contested below the formal letter of the law in Malaysia. Analysing court cases, interviews with lawyers, and public discourse, I encounter a paradox: that stateless people in Malaysia are produced through juridical, bureaucratic, and discursive repudiations of their claims to statelessness. Adhering to “nation-statist logics,” Malaysian state actors commonly reject citizenship claimants’ assertions of being stateless by classifying them instead as foreigners, thus shunting responsibility for their inclusion elsewhere beyond Malaysian borders. These practices disproportionately burden minorities with racialized, migrant backgrounds with presumptions of having “potential citizenship” elsewhere, even if such links are tenuous or merely theoretical. By centering how stateless people articulate their belonging in the face of abject exclusion, and how categories of stateless and citizen are flexibly mobilized in legal, political, and social spheres, this article offers new avenues for critiquing the normativity of the contemporary nation-state system.