ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses statelessness as a growing phenomenon in our time. Today statelessness is less due to breakdown of states but more due to cracks appearing in the map of citizenship in various countries. This is the main reason as to why the international provisions on statelessness are now increasingly ineffective. Statelessness is less associated with classic refugee situation, and more with the breakdown of citizenship policies. It has become the destiny of precarious labour migrants across the borders, and now even within a country. Labour migrants are dispossessed of many of the citizenship rights whenever they are away from homes. Massive waves of migration contain people who are moving due to all kinds of reasons – political persecution, labouring needs, environmental degradation, ecological disasters, sexual oppression, as well as trafficking. The problem at one level is one of statelessness which is created out of this situation, at another level it is a problem of what we may call “anti-citizenship”. It is a situation, where “undocumented migrants” often end up being stateless, languishing in jails, detention centres, and dying with no state to look for protection. They are seen as “anti-citizens” because they are considered a burden on society. Yet, as the chapter argues, the borderland existence of a vast illegal population in various countries with no state to look forward to for protection indicates the possibilities of spaces other than the nationalised ones. These “other spaces” are beyond the inside/outside, beyond our comfort zone. They require continuous formation through entering into relations with new forces from the outside.
