ABSTRACT
Statelessness is both a legal/bureaucratic category and an evolving discursive concept within global governance. Statelessness as a discursive concept relates to a system of knowledge and communication imbued with power which shapes social practices and constructs the way people experience the world. It sets the parameters of policy discussions and influences international policy recommendations and action plans. Chapter 3 explores how ‘the state’ and ‘the stateless person’ have been constructed within global governance agendas on nationality and statelessness. It considers how approaches to statelessness evolved in ways that largely by-pass the issues of states’ central roles in producing and reproducing statelessness and state crime; and how archetypal notions of the ‘stateless person’ as invisible to states and international bureaucracies have emerged, shaping policies that approach statelessness as a result of state oversight rather than state crime.
