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i
2020 Editorial Team
EDITORS IN CHIEF
Professor Michelle Foster
Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness,
Melbourne Law School (Australia)
Dr Laura van Waas
Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion
(The Netherlands)
CASE NOTE EDITOR
Dr Katia Bianchini
Researcher, Max Planck Institute for Social
Anthropology, Department of Law and
Anthropology, Halle (Saale) Germany
CRITIQUE AND COMMENT
EDITOR
Dr Kristy A Belton
Director of Professional Development,
International Studies Association and
Senior Programme Officer, Institute on
Statelessness and Inclusion (The
Netherlands)
BOOK REVIEW EDITOR
Barbara von Rütte
Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Max-Planck
Institute for the Study of Religious and
Ethnic Diversity (Germany)
MANAGING EDITORS
Maria Jose Recalde-Vela
PhD Researcher, Tilburg Law School and
Programme Officer (Volunteer), Institute on
Statelessness and Inclusion (The
Netherlands)
Jade Roberts
PhD Researcher, Peter McMullin Centre on
Statelessness, Melbourne Law School
(Australia)
PRODUCTION EDITOR
Eliah Castiello
CITATIONS MANAGER AND
SUBMISSIONS COORDINATOR
Natasha Birimac
Calin Miles
COPY EDITORS
Ingrid Bennett
Wilson Lee
Ilaria Bigaran
Calin Miles
Shyamni Chokshi
Bella Ruskin
Julia Despard
Vidushi Sinha
Andrew Du
Victor Sun
Andrew Kuoch
Rachel Walters
ii
Editorial Board
Dr Edwin Abuya
Associate Professor at the School of Law, University of Nairobi (Kenya)
Dr Seth Anziska
Mohamed S Farsi-Polosnky Lecturer in Jewish–Muslim Relations, University College London
(UK)
Professor Osamu Arakaki
PhD Professor of International Law at International Christian University (Japan)
Mr Fateh Azzam
Human Rights Consultant; Executive Member, Boston Consortium for Arab Region Studies
(USA)
Professor Matthew J Gibney
Professor of Politics and Forced Migration, Refugee Studies Centre, University of Oxford (UK)
Professor Penny Green
Professor of Law and Globalisation, and Director of the International State Crime Initiative,
Queen Mary University of London (UK)
Professor Dr Gerard-René de Groot
Emeritus Professor of Comparative Law and Private International Law, Maastricht University
(Netherlands); Professor of Private Law, University of Aruba (West Indies)
Professor Linda Kerber
May Brodbeck Professor in the Liberal Arts and Professor of History, Emerita, University of
Iowa (USA)
Professor Audrey Macklin
Director of the Centre for Criminology and Sociolegal Studies and Professor and Chair in
Human Rights, University of Toronto (Canada)
Dr Bronwen Manby
Visiting Senior Fellow, Centre for the Study of Human Rights, London School of Economics (UK)
Dr Parivelan KM
Associate Professor & Chairperson, Nodal Centre of Excellence for Human Rights Education &
Centre for Statelessness and Refugee Studies, School of Law, Rights and Constitutional
Governance, Tata Institute of Social Sciences (India)
Dr Nando Sigona
Senior Lecturer & Birmingham Fellow and Deputy Director, Institute for Research into
Superdiversity, University of Birmingham (UK)
Professor Julia Sloth-Nielson
Professor, Department of Public Law and Jurisprudence, University of the Western Cape (South
Africa) and Professor of Children's Rights in the Developing World, University of Leiden
(Netherlands)
Professor Kim Rubenstein
Professor of Law and Public Policy Fellow, Australian National University (Australia)
Professor Peter Spiro
Charles Weiner Professor of Law, Temple University Law School (USA)
iii
Artwork: Critical Mass
The featured artwork on our website was submitted as part of an open call for pieces
responding to the Review’s focus on advancing understandings of statelessness and citizenship
phenomena and challenges. ‘Critical Mass’ has been developed by architect and artist Wasim
Z Habashneh. The artist’s statement is as follows:
Using the traditional sand art practiced in Jordan to fill discarded fluorescent tubes with
pixelated patterns.
This pattern reflects the critical mass, a term that indicates the sufficient number of
adopters of innovation in a social system, so that the rate of adoption becomes self-
sustaining and creates further growth. The layers of sand are positioned to resemble the
transition phase of a critical mass affecting the existing mass.
The sand particles resemble the human presence and necessity in such an environment.
The piece questions the definition of a normal and healthy community: statelessness and
citizenship are now an inevitable reality in our world, therefore finding ways to include
them in our collective pattern is as important as retaining the current one.
Submissions
The Statelessness & Citizenship Review is an online, open source academic journal that
publishes two issues per year. Please send an electronic copy of your submission, preferably
in Microsoft Word format, to the Editors in Chief at:
<info@screview.net>
All articles, critique and comments and case notes published are refereed. Other pieces are
refereed at the discretion of the Editors in Chief.
Online Resources
All pieces in this issue are available from our website:
<statelessnessandcitizenshipreview.com>
All URLs cited in this issue are active as of December 2020.
Citations
This issue has been cited in accordance with the fourth edition of the Oxford University Standard
for the Citation of Legal Authorities (‘OSCOLA’) as supplemented by the Review’s House Rules
on grammar, punctuation and citation.
iv
This volume and issue may be cited as:
(2020) 2(2) Statelessness & Citizenship Review
© Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness and Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion 2020
All rights by all media reserved
v
Table of Contents
ARTICLES
Fighting Imagined Invasions with Administrative Violence: Racism,
Xenophobia and Nativism as a Cause of Statelessness in Myanmar, the
Dominican Republic and Assam (India)
José-María Arraiza, Phyu Zin Aye and Marina Arraiza Shakirova
194
Addressing Statelessness through the International Convention on the
Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination (‘ICERD’)
Michiel Hoornick
222
‘Legal Identity for All’ and Statelessness: Opportunity and Threat at the
Junction of Public and Private International Law
Bronwen Manby
248
‘Humanising’ Statelessness through an Artistic Approach
Md Mizanur Rahman
272
The Broadening Protection Gap for Stateless Palestinian Refugees in Belgium
Wout Van Doren, Julie Lejeune, Marjan Claes and Valerie Klein
300
CASE NOTES
Tokyo High Court, Judgment, Heisei 30 Nen (Gyou-Ko), No 232 (29 January
2020)
Osamu Arakaki and Wawine Waworuntu Yamashita
317
Sudita Keita v Hungary — European Court of Human Rights Decision on the
Right to Private Life of Stateless Persons
Patrícia Cabral
324
Kennedy Gihana & Others v Republic of Rwanda, Application No 017/2015
Tshegofatso Mothapo
331
vi
CRITIQUE AND COMMENTARY
Nomads and the Struggle for a Legal Identity
Heather Alexander
338
Rohingyas and the (Il)Legal Quest for an Indian Identity
Tejal Khanna
342
Digital ID and Risk of Statelessness
Grace Mutung’u and Isaac Rutenberg
348
BOOK REVIEWS
Offshore Citizens: Temporary Status in the Gulf by Noora Lori (Cambridge
University Press)
Thomas McGee
355
Citizenship: What Everyone Needs to Know by Peter J Spiro (Oxford University
Press)
Katherine Southwick
361
BOOK REVIEW SYMPOSIUM
THE PEOPLE IN QUESTION: CITIZENS AND CONSTITUTIONS IN UNCERTAIN TIMES
BY JO SHAW (BRISTOL UNIVERSITY PRESS)
Introduction: The People in Question? Constitutional Citizenship and Its Impact
on Statelessness and Citizenship Studies
Barbara von Rütte
368
The Constitutional Citizen in Narratives of Peoplehood
Johanna Hase
372
vii
Constitutions, Citizenship and the Shadow of Statelessness
Natalie Baird
377
Citizenship, Constitutions and Peoples on the Margins
Julija Sardelić
384
People, Sovereignty and Citizenship: The Ethnonational Populists’
Constitutional Vocabulary
Kriszta Kovács
389
‘HUMANISING’ STATELESSNESS THROUGH AN
ARTISTIC APPROACH
MD MIZANUR RAHMAN*
In this article I critically examine an art-based approach to statelessness in institutional settings,
to show how art can produce alternative insights on statelessness. Drawing from ethnographic
observation, I show how an art-based approach tries to go beyond the predominant legalistic and
political frames and representations of statelessness, but stay married to the same legal and
political discourses. I found the art-based approaches observed do not subscribe to the idea that
statelessness is only a legal anomaly and instead emphasise the creation of empathy for stateless
individuals or groups. This humanises statelessness by showing their human vulnerability and
creatively recognising their hope and agency. Regardless, artistic approaches can struggle to
challenge the legalistic and political nature of the problem. It remains a question whether such
approaches are appropriately promoting the views, perceptions and feelings of stateless persons
themselves, as their participation in creating such art projects are minimal. As such, I argue for
an ‘ethnographic turn in art practices’, which can ensure the participation of stateless people in
the process of creating and demonstrating art. I believe this ‘turn’ could play a crucial role in the
development of statelessness studies.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 273
Methodology ......................................................................................................... 274
The State of Statelessness Research: A Short Literature Review ......................... 277
Defining Statelessness: Legal Framing and Representation ..................... 277
Solving and Preventing Statelessness: A Focus on the ‘Nation-State’
and Law .................................................................................................... 278
Human Rights Perspective: Emphasising the Nation-State ...................... 280
Dominant Framing and Representations of Statelessness: Invisibility
in Statelessness ......................................................................................... 281
An Artistic Approach to Statelessness ...................................................... 282
‘Humanising’ Statelessness through Generating Empathy ................................... 283
Freeing Neha: An Art Experiment to Make Participants Feel
‘Legal Limbo’ ........................................................................................... 287
Unseen and Untouchables: Searching for Hope with Hope ..................... 291
How Do You Survive in a World That Does Not Recognise You?:
Recognising ‘Agency’ .............................................................................. 294
Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 297
* Md Mizanur Rahman is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Jagannath University,
Bangladesh. He holds an MA in Development Studies with track Governance of Migration
and Diversity from the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University
Rotterdam, Netherlands. This article is an amended version of his Master’s thesis.
‘Humanising’ Statelessness
273
INTRODUCTION
We breathe, we bleed, we vibrate under the same sky as you. Our cries are whispers,
our shouts are demands. Our love utterances are curses… We pulse at within and
among these as you do. Yet, in your need to recognise, hypothesise, categorise,
theorise, legalise, you forget to humanise. We are not stateless, and we are not
merely a word. Within the act of listening lives the right to be heard.1
Statelessness is defined as the absence of a legal bond between the state and its
individuals. This is evident in the 1954 Convention Relating to the Status of
Stateless Persons (‘1954 Convention’), which in art 1(1) defines a stateless person
as, ‘a person who is not considered as a national by any State under the operation
of its law’.2 Article 15 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states
that everybody has a right to nationality and nobody should arbitrarily be deprived
of nationality.3 Those who do not have this fundamental right are considered
stateless and may not enjoy the rights of citizenship offered by a state. Often, this
legal bond with the state is intricately related to those rights associated with
citizenship, meaning non-citizens are unable to enjoy the same domestic standard
of rights that citizens do.4 This is no surprise when the existing legal and political
discourses focus on the citizenship, nationality and legal aspects of statelessness.
The legal discourse sees the issue as a ‘legal anomaly’ and the stateless are treated
as ‘non-persons’ and ‘legal ghosts’.5 Such rhetoric confirms statelessness as
nothing more than a formalised condition of insecurity and inferiority, makes
stateless people invisible and places emphasis upon the sovereign power of states
to differentiate between who might appear or disappear under the operation of its
law; who does or does not belong.6 The ‘ghostliness’ of stateless persons portrayed
in legal discourses dehumanises the issue by ignoring their feelings, perceptions
and experiences. There is a growing sentiment among academics that legal and
political approaches to ending statelessness are perhaps insufficient for such a
complex problem. In this context, many believe that art can be an effective and
alternative approach to presenting the complexity of statelessness to a wider
audience. An artistic approach may, therefore, be an effective means of addressing
the issue of statelessness and creating an environment that ensures justice for
stateless persons through empathy, feeling and visualisation.7
1 Valerie Peay, ‘Humanise’ (Spoken Creative Writing Piece, World Conference on
Statelessness and Inclusion (Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, 26 June) 27:00 − 28:06
<https://twitter.com/institute_si/status/1144573743424872448>.
2 See Convention Relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September
1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960) art 1 (‘1954 Convention’).
3 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, GA Res 217A (III), UN GAOR, 3rd sess, 183rd plen
mtg, UN Doc A/810 (10 December 1948) art 15.
4 The Rights of Non-Citizens (Report, UNHCR 2006) 5
<https://www.ohchr.org/documents/publications/noncitizensen.pdf>.
5 Angela M Naimou, ‘Statelessness and the Making of a Decolonial Aesthetics in US
Literature’ (DPhil Thesis, Cornell University 2009) 22.
6 ibid 23.
7 See, eg, Nicoletta Enria, ‘Fostering Radical Empathy for Statelessness Using Arts’, European
Network on Statelessness (Blog Post, 24 January 2019)
<www.statelessness.eu/blog/fostering-radical-empathy-statelessness-using-arts>; Alex
Danchev and Debbie Lisle, ‘Introduction: Art, Politics, Purpose’ (2009) 35(4) Review of
International Studies 775; Lindsey N Kingston, ‘Conceptualizing Statelessness as a Human
Rights Challenge: Framing, Visual Representation, and (Partial) Issue Emergence’ (2019)
11(1) Journal of Human Rights Practice 52.
2020 Statelessness
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In this article, I examine one such art-based approach employed by United
Kingdom-based organisation Empathy and Risk,8 and its Netherlands-based
partner organisation, Creative Court,9 where I worked as an intern for six months.
This article is primarily based on my observations and analyses of the artworks
exhibited and performed by those two organisations at the World Conference on
Statelessness and Inclusion organised by the Institute of Statelessness and
Inclusion (‘ISI’) that ran from 26–28 June 2019 in The Hague.10 I argue that the
art-based approaches discussed in this paper intend to problematise discourses
surrounding statelessness that are mostly limited to the legal and political fields.
These artistic approaches try to break through this prevalence of legal rhetoric and
metaphor. Through various artworks, they intend to humanise statelessness by
bringing forward the agency, experiences, feelings, perceptions and hopes of
stateless persons. In essence, an artistic approach aims to create empathy for the
stateless. This paper demonstrates how art can ‘humanise’ the issue of
statelessness through the generation of empathy for stateless persons that results
from addressing their vulnerability, recognising their agency and engaging in their
hopes. Artworks can successfully frame and represent statelessness in a different
way, but often do not challenge dominant discourses or seek to change them. As
will be discussed, I consider this inaction to be a major drawback of artistic
approaches.
METHODOLOGY
This article addresses four questions. First, how have academics in legal, political
and human rights fields framed and represented statelessness? Second, how does
the art-based approach employed by Empathy and Risk and Creative Court frame
and represent statelessness through various artworks? Third, how does an art-
based approach produce a novel or different discourse on statelessness than that
of law-based discourse? And finally, what are the drawbacks of such an approach?
I adopted an ethnographical approach described by David Mosse to answer these
questions, understand the ideas and practices of the aforementioned organisations
and engage in their art projects and events on statelessness.11 In doing so, I
positioned myself as an embedded researcher to explore the material and
discursive practices of Empathy and Risk and Creative Court in everyday settings.
Mosse stated that this type of insight
do[es] not arise from conventional anthropological research projects, but are the
result of reflection on the experience of living and working as part of the
interconnected expert world of international development.12
He categorises this type of research as ‘insider ethnography’ or ‘autoethnography’
— a form of research that values the reflexive capabilities of an observant
participant as much as participant observers.13 His objective is to move from
8 See Empathy and Risk (Web Page) <http://www.empathyandrisk.com/>.
9 See Creative Court (Web Page) <https://www.creativecourt.org/>.
10 For details, see ‘World Conference on Statelessness’, Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion
(Web Page, 2019) <https://www.institutesi.org/raising-awareness/world-conference-on-
statelessness>.
11 David Mosse (ed), Adventures in Aidland: The Anthropology of Professionals in International
Development (Berghan 2011).
12 ibid vii.
13 ibid.
‘Humanising’ Statelessness
275
‘planning knowledge out of ethnography’ towards making ‘ethnography out of
planned knowledge’.14
In this type of research, insights come from combining the experience of insider
participation with the detachment of an outsider.15 My positions both as an intern
of Creative Court and as an observer meet this standard; I both observed and
partook in activities related to knowledge production processes on statelessness
and artistic practices. Consistent challenges in the duality of my positions were
found in my pre-existing biases and assumptions regarding the issue of
statelessness. On this challenge, Kim England argued that it is not easy for the
researcher to take the ‘personal’ out of the equation when it comes to the
‘professional’, because fieldwork itself is personal.16 For instance, I initially
assumed that operating within the nation-state framework without challenging it
was not going to help eradicate statelessness. However, Rabiaa Benlahbib, director
of Creative Court, maintained a position that the organisation was not going to
make things political. It was hard for me to understand such a position as, for me,
art is inherently political, regardless of whether one wants it to be or not. So, when
we engaged in discussion, I would pose the idea of challenging the nation-state,
and she would motivate me to look at the influence and significance of artistic
approaches to statelessness. Gradually, both our opinions took on characteristics
of the other’s argument. She would say, ‘I want you to get yourself out from under
your academic ideas and think like a human’.17 I would then argue that ‘as a
human being, I cannot alienate my background or the waves of thought I have
developed over the years’.18 Ghislaine Gallenga illustrated these delicate
challenges that derive from doing ethnography in the workplace. She states, ‘the
main drawbacks are that the ethnographer will only be assigned a subordinate role
and will be constantly caught between her position as an employee and her status
as a researcher’.19 In this context, ‘interpretive reflexivity’ was important for me
to deal with those challenges. According to Paul Lichterman,
[i]f we ethnographers want to make our explanatory claims more transparent and
disputable by readers, then we need to show readers how we came up with our
interpretations, how we made mistakes and lucky guesses along the way to
capturing other people’s meanings. That is what interpretive reflexivity discloses.20
I found this insight useful when writing my field notes and subsequently
analysing my notes in a more reflective way.
My position as an intern also allowed me to observe and participate in Creative
Court’s artistic approach to conceptualising, framing and representing
statelessness. I have used observation for this ethnographic research to collect the
primary materials used for this article, along with my everyday conversations and
idea exchanges with members of Creative Court. I did not conduct any structured
14 ibid viii.
15 ibid.
16 Kim England, ‘Getting Personal: Reflexivity, Positionality, and Feminist Research’ (1994)
46(1) The Professional Geographer 85.
17 Informal Conversation with Rabiaa Benlahbib, Director, Creative Court (Mizanur Rahman,
Creative Court 15 March 2019).
18 ibid
19 Ghislaine Gallenga, ‘Elements of Reflexive Anthropology in Three Fieldwork Studies of the
Workplace’ (2013) 2(2) Journal of Business Anthropology 187, 189.
20 Paul Lichterman, ‘Interpretive Reflexivity in Ethnography’ (2015) 18(1) Ethnography 35, 38.
(emphasis in original).
2020 Statelessness
&
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or semi-structured interviews, as I wanted to experience the artistic process of the
organisation and events from a ‘natural’ setting. I felt that interviews could have
manipulated my experience as an observant participant. I was engaged in informal
discussions with the artists, participants and other members of Creative Court as a
team member. Throughout the observation process, I was also a participant. This
meant the observed were aware of my presence as a researcher as I participated in
the process. This strategy was labelled as ‘candid participance’ in observational
studies.21 Being an intern and a researcher at the same time allowed me to ‘explore
what people actually do, and not just what they say they do’.22
As an intern of Creative Court, I had access to the events that Creative Court
organised and participated in. This included the 2019 World Conference on
Statelessness and Inclusion organised by the Institute on Statelessness and
Inclusion (‘ISI’). Creative Court participated in that Conference with their partner
organisation, Empathy and Risk. They participated through the presentation of
their artworks, such as visual photography, video installation, audio installation,
poetry, live performances, art experiments and discussion sessions. This
conference was the focus of my observation and research; most of my
observational data derived from this conference setting. As part of the Conference
I attended a series of discussions and exhibits with artists. Observing and
participating in those events and discussions helped me to understand how
statelessness is currently framed and the concepts behind those frames. Besides
the Conference, Creative Court was also working on a new artistic project to
illustrate the connection and resilience of stateless people. As an active participant
in this artistic research project, I have observed and analysed the types of
knowledge and ideas that are being employed to conceptualise and represent
statelessness. Data was recorded in a diary with written notes and observations,
photos of the artworks and evening elaborations upon the observation data, all of
which were analysed later.
Insights from the anthropology of art were useful in understanding and
examining the role of artistic approaches in the field of statelessness. For example,
Alfred Gell’s concept of the ‘anthropology of art’ emphasised the importance of
the social context of art production, circulation and reception, rather than the
evaluation of particular works of art.23 By observing Creative Court’s particular
artistic approach, this research also goes beyond individual pieces of artwork, and
instead concentrates on the ideas, frames and concepts that art-based approaches
deliver upon statelessness. Similarly, Austin Harrington argued that the
anthropology of art should show
how aesthetic frames of perception enter into textual aspects of metaphor, analogy
and vignette, into sensuous media of data analysis such as visual images and life-
story narratives; and into conceptions of theatrical qualities in social action.24
Thus, the anthropology of art is not only concerned with the materiality of
artworks, but also retains a focus on the knowledge art produces when people
21 Zina O’Leary, The Essential Guide to Doing Your Research Project (Sage Publishing 2009)
253.
22 ibid 254.
23 Alfred Gell, Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory (Oxford University Publishing
1998) 3.
24 Austin Harrington, Art and Social Theory: Sociological Argument in Aesthetics (Wiley 2004)
6.
‘Humanising’ Statelessness
277
embrace and engage with it. Throughout this research, I investigated the artworks,
metaphors, performances related to statelessness informed by such insights.
Finally, I followed the grounded theory approach to understand my observation
notes, transcriptions of discussion sessions, informal discussions and
conversations. I decided not to employ a pre-determined theoretical framework to
look at my data. Rather, I wanted to see what themes and sub-themes came from
my observations and how these fit or contradicted existing discourses. Barney
Glaser and Anselm Strauss considered grounded theory to address ‘how the
discovery of theory from data systematically obtained and analysed in social
research-can be furthered’, rather than the rigorous analysis conducted upon the
data in the theories of other sociological studies.25 Likewise, the main concepts in
this article — humanisation, empathy, hope and agency — came from my
observation of the artworks, narrative and concepts employed by Creative Court
and Empathy and Risk, as well as through my informal discussions and
conversations with the artists and officials of both organisations.
THE STATE OF STATELESSNESS RESEARCH: A SHORT LITERATURE REVIEW
Statelessness is still considered an understudied and neglected issue.26
Nevertheless, academics and organisations — such as the United Nations High
Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’), European Network on Statelessness and
ISI — publish a significant amount of research on statelessness. It is impossible
to present the plethora of research and literature in these short paragraphs, but I
intend to present the main thematic areas from existing pieces of literature. I have
divided the literature into three broad thematic areas to present how statelessness
is dominantly framed and represented, namely, defining statelessness, solving or
preventing statelessness and critiques of human rights and nation-state
frameworks. This also answers my first research question. Later, I discuss the
importance of using art and artistic approaches to show what place art has in the
field of statelessness.
Defining Statelessness: Legal Framing and Representation
Theoretically speaking, defining statelessness from a legal perspective is
straightforward since, as explained above, the 1954 Convention outlines the
definition of stateless persons. However, it is a complex and multifaceted issue
and can arise from many different contexts and circumstances.27 Common
representations of statelessness emphasise that a lack of a nationality creates a
25 Barney Glaser and Anselm L Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for
Qualitative Research (Aldine Transaction 1967) 1.
26 Alice Edwards and Laura Van Waas, ‘Statelessness’ in Elena Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al (eds),
The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration Studies (Oxford University
Publishing 2014) 290, 298.
27 See Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole, ‘Introduction: Providing a
Framework for Understanding Statelessness’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss & Phillip
Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017). See also Handbook on
Statelessness in the OSCE Area: International Standards and Good Practices (Report,
Organization for Security and Co-Operation in Europe 28 February 2017) 9
<https://www.osce.org/files/f/documents/5/1/302201.pdf>; Institute on Statelessness and
Inclusion, The World’s Stateless (Wolf Legal 2014).
2020 Statelessness
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Citizenship Review 2(2)
278
structural and legal imbalance for those it effects.28 Some have also argued that
the term statelessness is a slippery one; it is perceived by some as a narrow,
technical, legal concept, yet embraced by others as a broad descriptor for a lack of
belonging or situation of rightlessness.29 Generally speaking, defining
statelessness is about the absence of nationality. Thus, narratives of statelessness
often define statelessness as a legal anomaly of non-existent legal bonds between
the people and state. In doing so, predominant legal narratives and discourses do
not give attention to the perception, feelings or agency of stateless persons — they
become a number. But people do not connect with numbers, nor do they feel
empathy for statistics.
Solving and Preventing Statelessness: A Focus on the ‘Nation-State’ and
Law
The second stream of literature focuses on those issues associated with finding
solutions and resolving statelessness. The #IBelong Campaign to End
Statelessness launched by UNHCR in November 2014 renewed optimism for the
prevention of statelessness, and was endorsed by the United Nations General
Assembly in the same year.30 Much of the literature on solving statelessness
identifies the nation-state’s role as key, regardless of the different strategies that
need to be adopted or areas to be improved. Some authors stress the need for the
proper and full implementation of the 1954 Convention and 1961 Convention on
the Reduction of Statelessness,31 while others point to the importance of human
rights conventions to deal with statelessness.32 Others still have a different
approach to resolving statelessness based on how they conceptualise statelessness
in the first place. For example, Radha Govil suggests that implementing the 2015
UN Sustainable Development Goals can help reduce statelessness, as statelessness
is a core development issue, not just a humanitarian and human rights issue.33
28 See, eg, See Lindsey N Kingston, ‘Worthy of Rights: Statelessness as a Cause and Symptom
of Marginalisation’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds),
Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 17; Caia Vlieks, ‘Contexts of Statelessness:
The Concepts of “Statelessness in Situ” and “Statelessness in the Migratory Context”’ in
Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness
(Routledge 2017) 35.
29 Amal de Chikera and Laura van Waas, ‘Unpacking Statelessness’ in Tendayi Bloom,
Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 53.
30 Global Action Plan to End Statelessness 2014–2024 (Report, UNHCR 2014)
<https://www.unhcr.org/en-au/protection/statelessness/54621bf49/global-action-plan-end-
statelessness-2014-2024.html> (‘UNHCR Global Action Plan’).
31 See Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, opened for signature 30 August 1961, 989
UNTS 175 (entered into force 13 December 1975). See also Edwards and van Waas (n 26);
Amal de Chikera and Joanna Whiteman, ‘Addressing Statelessness through the Rights to
Equality and Non-Discrimination’ in Laura Van Waas and Melanie J Khanna (eds), Solving
Statelessness (Wolf Legal 2017) 99; Türk Volker, ‘Introduction’ in Laura Van Waas &
Melanie J Khanna (eds), Solving Statelessness (Wolf Legal 2016) 1.
32 Melanie J Khanna and Peggy Brett, ‘Making Effective Use of UN Human Rights Mechanisms
to Solve Statelessness’ in Laura Van Waas and Melanie J Khanna (eds), Solving Statelessness
(Wolf Legal 2016) 13.
33 Radha Govil, ‘The Sustainable Development Goals and Solutions to Statelessness’ in Laura
Van Waas and Melanie J Khanna (eds), Solving Statelessness (Wolf Legal 2016) 49, citing
Transforming Our World: The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, UN Doc
A/RES/70/1 (21 October 2015) 21.
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Tamás Molnár has expressed a similar view.34 From the literature concerned with
solving statelessness, whether by implementing human rights conventions
properly or by eradicating discriminatory nationality laws based on gender, race,
ethnicity or religion,35 it is undeniable that the nation-state is a point of focus.
Nevertheless, some literature also discusses how international and regional
communities can create pressure on states or mobilise the rights of stateless
persons to influence nation-states.36
In contrast, other literature focuses on the setbacks involved in resolving
statelessness. For instance, Zahra Al Barazi and Jason Tucker have discussed how
the absence of a common language or consistent frameworks for accessing
citizenship — in avoiding statelessness — hinders the efficacy of reducing
statelessness in a region such as the Middle East.37 Tendayi Bloom problematises
the idea that stateless persons ought to find remedies for their situation through the
citizenship framework of the recognised nation-state, although the author does not
deny the importance of citizenship in the current nation-state-based world for
accessing human rights.38 Similarly, Kelly Staples also focuses on the
discriminatory way states treat certain groups in the provision of citizenship rights
and their inability to ensure basic universality in human status.39 This last point
remains a setback to UNHCR’s aims of ending statelessness through birth
registration, documentation and non-discrimination, reflected in each case in the
politics of recognition.40
34 Tamás Molnár, ‘A Fresh Examination of Facilitated Naturalization as a Solution for Stateless
People’ in Laura Van Waas and Melanie J Khanna (eds), Solving Statelessness (Wolf Legal
2016) 230.
35 Laura van Waas, Zahra Albarazi and Deirdre Brennan, ‘Gender Discrimination in Nationality
Laws: Human Rights Pathways to Gender Neutrality’ in Niamh Reilly (ed), International
Human Rights of Women (Springer 2019) 193, 207; Neda Shaheen, ‘Discriminatory
Nationality Laws Must Be Eliminated in Order to Eradicate Statelessness’ (2018) 11(2)
DePaul Journal for Social Justice 1; Ronan Lee, ‘Myanmar’s Citizenship Law as State
Crime’ (2019) 8(2) State Crime Journal 241.
36 Bronwen Manby, Ayalew Getachew Assefa and Julia Sloth-Nielsen, ‘The Right to a
Nationality in Africa: New Norms and New Commitments’ in Laura Van Waas and Melanie
J Khanna (eds), Solving Statelessness (Wolf Legal 2016) 261; Laura van Waas, Katja Swider
and Giulia Bittoni, ‘The Evolving Role of the European Union in Addressing Statelessness’
in Laura Van Waas and Melanie J Khanna (eds), Solving Statelessness (Wolf Legal 2017)
375.
37 Zahra Al Barazi and Jason Tucker, ‘Challenging the Disunity of Statelessness in the Middle
East and North Africa’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds),
Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 87.
38 Tandayi Bloom, ‘Members of Colonised Groups, Statelessness and the Right to Have Rights’
in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness
(Routledge 2017) 153.
39 Kelly Staples, ‘Recognition, Nationality, and Statelessness: State-Based Challenges for
UNHCR’s Plan to End Statelessness’ in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole
(eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 173.
40 See, eg, UNHCR Global Action Plan (n 30). See also Ending Statelessness within 10 Years
(Report, UNHCR 2010)
<https://www.unhcr.org/protection/statelessness/546217229/special-report-ending-
statelessness-10-years.html>; I Am Here, I Belong: The Urgent Need to End Childhood
Statelessness (Report, UNHCR 2015) <https://www.unhcr.org/ibelong/the-urgent-need-to-
end-childhood-statelessness/>.
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Human Rights Perspective: Emphasising the Nation-State
Hannah Arendt, in her famous book The Origins of Totalitarianism, coined the
phrase ‘the right to have rights’ to describe the situation of stateless persons.41
Careful analysis of her position on statelessness shows that, in order to have or
enjoy other human rights, being merely human is not enough. Rather, one must
have a right of nationality first or be a part of a political community. 42 Thus,
Arendt rejected the normative claims of universal rights.43 Arendt concludes that
what stateless people lack is the fundamental ‘right to have rights’; the political
and legal recognition that would come with being a member of a certain political
community.44
Brad Blitz and Miguel Otero-Iglesias summarised this position on
statelessness:
For Arendt, statelessness illustrated a situation of ‘rightlessness’ which involved
three distinct losses: of a home, as a result of being thrust into exile; of government
protection, as a result of denaturalisation or the severing of the bond between the
state and the individual; and of ‘a place in the world’ where the individual could
belong, be heard and express his or her opinions. Statelessness therefore entailed
the loss of the right to have rights.45
The presence of stateless people led Arendt to claim that human rights,
supposedly universal, have no meaning unless they can be anchored to an effective
source of protection and, for her, the only option is the state.46 Giorgio Agamben
also rejected the idea that human rights are guaranteed to human beings just
because they are human.47 Unlike Arendt, said John Lechte and Saul Newman,
Agamben believes that zoē [‘bare life’] is appropriated by the mechanisms of
sovereign political power even as the excluded and abandoned entity, caught, as he
puts it, in the relation of the ban. In other words, to be subject to the ban or to be
consigned to the status of homo sacer — the ‘sacred’ man who may be killed but
not sacrificed — is to be placed on a terrain of radical freedom (as in the State of
Nature), but, on the contrary, to be abandoned by the law and removed from its
protections, and thus to be subject to lawless sovereign violence.48
This situation of abandonment by law or the sovereign ‘ban’ applies to the
situation of stateless people.49 Both Arendt and Agamben were critical of the
sovereignty of the state, but at the same time, they did not offer us any other way
to conceptualise or define statelessness. Notably, Arendt’s critical stance of
41 Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (new edn, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976)
302.
42 ibid.
43 See Brad K Blitz and Miguel Otero-Iglesias, ‘Stateless by Any Other Name: Refused Asylum-
Seekers in the United Kingdom’ (2011) 37(4) Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 657,
658–60.
44 John Lechte and Saul Newman, ‘Agamben, Arendt and Human Rights: Bearing Witness to
the Human’ (2012) 15(4) European Journal of Social Theory 522, 523.
45 Blitz and Otero-Iglesias (n 43) 659 (emphasis in original).
46 See Brad K Blitz, ‘The State and the Stateless: The Legacy of Hannah Arendt Reconsidered’
in Tendayi Bloom, Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness
(Routledge 2017) 70.
47 See Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University
Press 1998).
48 Lechte and Newman (n 44) 524 (emphasis in original), discussing Agamben (n 47) 110.
49 ibid 525.
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international law seems to stumble when she considers states for the protection of
the stateless people, when they are responsible for having made them stateless in
the first place.
Dominant Framing and Representations of Statelessness: Invisibility in
Statelessness
The kinds of literature discussed above are important to the analysis of
statelessness, but they suffer from a singular and linear way of seeing the subject.
This literature defines, categorises and theorises statelessness as centred on the
legal and nation-state framework. The framing of the issue relates to ‘nationality
law’, ‘international law’ and ‘citizenship statuses’. In this respect, stateless people
are merely visible through the lens of their legal status, they are represented as
‘rightless’ and ‘citizens of nowhere’.50 Meanwhile, their experiences mostly
remain invisible. Phillip Cole criticised such positions. He stated ‘finding a
solution to statelessness is about asking radical questions about the international
political order’.51 Cole also argued that
the theoretical basis for discourses of membership and mobility must be challenged
and transformed. What membership means has to be fought over, rather than taken
as our starting point. The fight is not just for membership, but also for its meaning.
And what we realise is that its meaning will be determined not by the theorists and
policy makers, but also by the stateless themselves acting out these ideas in their
everyday lives. What is needed is dialectic between theory and lived experience.52
This position is very similar to the anthropological criticism of ‘sedentary
metaphysics’, which sees peoples and cultures categorised into national soils and
the family of nations.53 Anthropologists taking up a postmodern view strongly
criticise the ‘territorialisation’ of people and culture within existing national
boundaries.54 Lisa Malkki questions the idea of territorialisation and brings
forward the idea of ‘deterritorialisation’, which focuses instead on issues such as
migration experiences, the memory of dispossession and displacement and lived
responses to being uprooted.55 However, these critical theories appear to be contra
to the dominant discourse; most political, legal and policy experts see statelessness
as a problem concerning citizenship and nationality. In doing so, they assume that
nationality is a natural concept and every person must have one. They
50 For an elaboration on this term see, eg, Citizens of Nowhere: Solutions for the Stateless in the
US (Report, UNHCR and Open Society Justice Initiative 2012).
51 Phillip Cole, ‘Insider Theory and the Construction of Statelessness’ in Tendayi Bloom,
Katherine Tonkiss and Phillip Cole (eds), Understanding Statelessness (Routledge 2017) 255,
258.
52 ibid 264 (emphasis in original).
53 Lisa Malkki, ‘National Geographic: The Rooting of Peoples and the Territorialization of
National Identity among Scholars and Refugees’ (1992) 7(1) Cultural Anthropology 24.
54 See, eg, Arjun Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’
(1990) 7(2–3) Theory, Culture & Society 295; James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art (Harvard University Press 1988);
Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Beacon Press 1989);
Ulf Hannerz, ‘The World in Creolisation’ (1987) 57(4) Africa: Journal of the International
African Institute 546.
55 Lisa Malkki (n 53), cited in Dawn Chatty, ‘Anthropology and Forced Migration’ in Elena
Fiddian-Qasmiyeh et al (eds), The Oxford Handbook of Refugee and Forced Migration
Studies (Oxford University Press 2014) 74, 75.
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conceptualise statelessness from a sedentary view, which undermines and ignores
stateless people’s perceptions and views.
An Artistic Approach to Statelessness
It is well recognised in academia that art is an important tool for challenging
existing knowledge and creating new knowledge(s), although it is conceptually
less focused. Alex Danchev and Debbie Lisle emphasised the importance of art in
society.56 They wrote,
art matters, ethically and politically; affectively and intellectually. It is another way
of apprehending the world. It has consequences. Not only does it make us feel, or
feel differently, it also makes us think, and think again.57
They call for a critical understanding and observation of art; ‘there must be a
politics in our observation’.58 On this, Harrington states, ‘[t]he knowledge art can
convey about society is no substitute for the methodical knowledge of social
science; but neither is it inferior or subordinate to the latter’.59
Art and artistic approaches have gained particular acceptance and importance
in the context of human rights issues. The European Union Agency for
Fundamental Rights (‘FRA’) states:
Much of the human rights agenda is directed at bridging attitudinal disparities, such
as prejudices based on race, religion, gender, age, nationality, culture and identity.
Art can help to overcome those barriers, by bringing a counter-discourse, contesting
privileged narratives and perspectives.60
FRA also recommended strengthening the connection between art and human
rights as it can reinforce the message of the latter. In this regard, the report stated:
The professional field of human rights can learn a lot from the field of arts.
Emotions commonly drive decisions; yet, modern societies (wrongly) believe to be
driven by rational thought and intellect. We do not only think, therefore we are, but
we also feel, therefore we are. Indeed, perceptions (including love, hate, hope,
forgiveness, horror and empathy) are more powerful than facts, especially when
society’s acceptance of facts is rapidly fracturing. … Art can transcend barriers,
such as politics and language.61
The artistic approach to addressing statelessness employed by Creative Court
and its partner organisation is also about showing stateless peoples’ conditions,
perceptions and feelings. Nicoletta Enria suggests radical empathy for
statelessness could be fostered through the utilisation of art.62 According to Enria,
in the case of statelessness, radical empathy would make audiences feel what it is
like to be a stateless person. She states,
56 See Danchev and Lisle (n 7).
57 ibid 775.
58 ibid.
59 Austin Harrington, Art and Social Theory: Sociological Argument in Aesthetics (Polity Press
2004) 4.
60 Exploring the Connection between Arts and Human Rights: Report of High-Level Expert
Meeting (Report, European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights 2017) 6
<https://fra.europa.eu/sites/default/files/fra_uploads/fra-2017_arts-and-human-rights-
report_may-2017_vienna.pdf>.
61 ibid 11–12.
62 Enria (n 7).
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art has always been effective at speaking out against injustice. Indeed, historically,
art has been a powerful resource for oppressed communities themselves to tell their
stories and mark their existence, by way of forcing people to listen, stop, reflect
and put themselves in their shoes. As such art can be an extremely effective way to
foster radical empathy.63
Similarly, Lindsey N Kingston places emphasis on visual representation to
bring the issue of statelessness to wider audiences.64
However, none of the reports or authors discussed investigate or ask how art
comes into being and what kind of ideas, knowledge and concepts are used to
develop an artistic approach. As Rika Allen argues, artistic representations often
reproduce knowledge that already exists. She argues that the knowledge artwork
brings forward cannot be neutral when the artist’s ideology plays such a crucial
role; the art is determined by the artist’s knowledge.65 Allen states, ‘the [artist’s]
gaze is influenced by what is known, knowledge is also influenced by how one
sees the world’.66 In the context of my research, I investigated these issues by
participating and observing the art-based approaches employed by Creative Court
and its partner on statelessness. I set out to understand the ways art frames and
represents statelessness, the strategies it suggests and the kind of knowledge it
brings forward from a critical standpoint.
‘HUMANISING’ STATELESSNESS THROUGH GENERATING EMPATHY
In this Part, I analyse the major themes that came from my observation. I show
how an artistic approach to statelessness strongly advocates communicating with
wider audiences by showing the human aspects of statelessness. The main
objective of this Part is to present how art ‘humanises’ statelessness and how it is
different from the dominant discourses already discussed, which in turn answers
my second and third research question simultaneously. Statelessness is most often
framed and represented as a ‘legal anomaly’67 and thus ‘exists in a vacuum’.68
Creative Court and its partner Empathy and Risk wanted to go beyond this lens
with their artwork. Both organisations shared a common idea: rules and laws
insufficiently address problems of stateless people — they do not show the human
side of the problem and fail to ‘move’ society. Building on this idea, they came up
with an art programme entitled ‘Cancelled Art’,69 which was designed to unveil
these human conditions of statelessness at the World Conference on Statelessness
and Inclusion. David Cottrell, founder of Empathy and Risk explained it in the
opening session of the conference. He said,
63 ibid.
64 Kingston, ‘Conceptualizing Statelessness’ (n 7) 52.
65 Rika Allen, ‘The Anthropology of Art and the Art of Anthropology — A Complex
Relationship’ (Masters Thesis, University of Stellenbosch 2008).
66 ibid 6.
67 For example see Alice Edwards and Carla Ferstman, Human Security and Non-Citizens: Law,
Policy and International Affairs (Cambridge University Press 2010); Mark Manly and Laura
van Waas, ‘The State of Statelessness Research’ (2014) 19(1–2) Tilburg Law Review 3.
68 Kingston, ‘Conceptualizing Statelessness’ (n 7) 54.
69 ‘Cancelled Art Programme’, Creative Court (Web Page, 2019)
<https://www.creativecourt.org/index.php/portfolio/cancelled/>; ‘Cancelled Arts
Programme’, Empathy and Risk (Web Page, 2019)
<http://www.empathyandrisk.com/2019/06/26/cancelled-arts-programme/>.
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The Cancelled Art programme has an unusual name. It occurs to us that something
has to exist first before it is cancelled, and somehow they are denied their agency
and access. We are thinking to understand the construction around it; it is not
something just about legal or illegal. We want to combine the pluralism of activities
through our programme. Through new artworks, archives, poetry, filmmaking,
installation art, performances we would try to remove the boundaries between
systems and individual, and we will show the human aspects of statelessness.70
During my internship, Rabiaa almost told me the same. She said:
In the conference, the idea is to translate the diverse experiences and conditions of
stateless people in artistic ways so that the wider audience feels empathy and
connection with the stateless people because the legal approach cannot do much in
this case of statelessness, which is apparent from the growing pile of stateless
people all around the world. We will try to translate these ideas which will be an
alternative way to experience the realities around statelessness.71
When I asked her what she means by ‘alternative way’, she replied with a smile,
‘a human way’.72
Thus, the main theme from my observation was a ‘humanisation’ of
statelessness. Artworks on statelessness have tried to frame and represent
statelessness in a variety of ways. This contrasts legalistic and state-centred
approaches, the strict foci of which can dehumanise stateless persons. The
message should be that stateless people are human beings, who have lost their
homes, occupations, languages and all the familiarity of life. The art-based
approach proposes to see them as human beings and, most importantly, suggests
listening to their stories to get a sense of their feelings of frustration, fear, denial,
resistance and agency, as well as their overall existence as stateless persons. Just
like Ralph Ya, an artist associated with Empathy and Risk told me: ‘we are here
to humanise the issue of statelessness. It’s about humanising this very legal thing
by establishing human connections between stateless people and the rest of us’.73
This motive to humanise statelessness through an artistic approach can also be
found in the work of Mark Manly and Laura van Waas:
Although statelessness is undeniably a legal anomaly, at its heart, it is also a human
condition. It affects people — often in devastating ways. Not only does it have an
impact on their legal status and ability to exercise rights, but it also affects the way
they are perceived and how they perceive themselves.74
How do you then humanise the issue of statelessness? Or, how do you establish
a human connection with people who have never experienced statelessness? The
major concept I heard over and over again during my internship was empathy.
David Cotterell, Rabiaa, other team members and artists all mentioned using art to
create empathy for the stateless person, so that policymakers, academics, experts
and civil society would understand what it is like to be a stateless person, and how
it feels when the world around you does not recognise you. Every artwork and
performance exhibited or performed in the conference venue had one common
70 David Cotterrell, Co-founder of Empathy and Risk, ‘Cancelled Art’ (Speech, World
Conference on Statelessness and Inclusion, 26 June 2019) (copy on hand with author).
71 Informal Conversation with Rabiaa Benlahbib, Director, Creative Court (Mizanur Rahman,
Creative Court 2 March 2019).
72 ibid.
73 Informal conversation with Ralph Ya, Artist, Empathy and Risk (Mizanur Rahman, 23 June
2019).
74 Manly and van Waas (n 67) 5.
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objective apart from their specific messages — create empathy among the
participants. How do we define empathy? Rabiaa once told me, ‘empathy means
feeling like someone. When you can feel like what a stateless person feels, that
will create empathy’.75
Empathy as a guiding concept for creating feeling and emotion for others is
well illustrated and supported by the existing literature. For instance, Faith Valente
argued:
Empathetic understanding is both an important determinant of how well we
communicate with each other as well as a personal characteristic that facilitates our
ability to persuade other people to accept an idea, feel a particular way, or pursue a
certain course of action.76
Thus, empathy can create cumulative responses and processes for further
action. As Ralph Adolphs mentions, each response from an empathetic attribution
is likely to start other empathetic processes and responses.77 As a practice,
empathy defines our sociality — it is intricately connected with ‘shared emotions’
and ‘social identity’.78 Therefore, empathy can be a useful method for learning
and reaching out to other people. For instance, Adil Kutlu and Lokman Coskun
discussed how empathy enabled students to get engaged in, and obtain, the desired
outcome in school. They argued:
Empathy teaches the teachers, parents, and the other people the way how to feel the
other people feel in the same fashion. Because, it is not possible to make people
have the same feelings and the same experiences in their lives, but it is possible to
put yourself in other's shoes to feel what they feel.79
Creative Court and Empathy and Risk wanted to undertake a similar task; create
empathy for stateless people among the participants of the conference who would
later do their best to erase statelessness.
Throughout the conference, several artworks and performances succeeded in
creating empathy within the participants, including me. For instance, on the first
day of the conference, Rabiaa asked me to write down ‘the absent’ and put it on
an empty chair (Figure 1). I then heard that there was a plan to keep a chair empty
for every staged session. I realised that this symbolic gesture was to recognise
stateless people — this conference was about them, but none of them could be
here without documents to travel. I truly felt the message conveyed. It was a
symbol of silence illustrating the absence of stateless people and their lack of legal
identity. This simple yet powerful gesture of artistic intervention was presenting
stateless people, generating feelings for them in myself and the participants. As
one participant said, ‘it is funny that we are here in a conference on statelessness,
75 Informal Conversation with Rabiaa Benlahbib, Director, Creative Court (Mizanur Rahman,
Creative Court 4 April 2019).
76 Faith Valente, ‘Empathy and Communication: A Model of Empathy Development’ (2016)
3(1) Journal of New Media and Mass Communication 1.
77 Ralph Adolphs, ‘The Social Brain: Neural Basis of Social Knowledge’ [2009] 60 Annual
Review of Psychology 693, 716.
78 Thomas Szanto and Joel Krueger, ‘Introduction: Empathy, Shared Emotions and Social
Identity’ (2019) 38(11) Topoi 153.
79 Adil Kutlu and Lokman Coskun, ‘The Role of Empathy in the Learning Process and Its
Fruitful Outcomes: A Comparative Study’ (2014) 4(2) Journal of Educational Research 203.
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but the stateless people themselves are not here, because they do not have a
passport’.80
Figure 1: An empty chair for the stateless people, the absent people.81
As the conference proceeded, I observed various participant reactions to
artworks and kept an account of my own feelings towards any particular piece. In
the following Part, I move to present and analyse various artworks and
experiments that tried to present different human aspects of statelessness.
Primarily, they sought to convey vulnerability, hope and agency.
80 Observation of an anonymous participant (Mizanur Rahman, World Conference on
Statelessness and Inclusion, 26 June 2019).
81 Mizanur Rahman, An Empty Chair for the Stateless People, the Absent People (Photo, World
Conference on Statelessness and Inclusion 26–28 June 2019).
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Freeing Neha: An Art Experiment to Make Participants Feel ‘Legal
Limbo’
Statelessness has been described as a ‘legal limbo’.82 Nonetheless, it is often not
entirely clear what that means. David Cottrell told me:
People do not easily understand what is meant by ‘legal limbo’. So, they do not feel
connected with the situation. We want to communicate with a wider audience
through art approaches to establish that human connection between the stateless
and the people who never knew what it feels like to be in a limbo situation.83
Creative Court and Empathy and Risk came up with the idea of a ‘bubble’ as a
metaphor to visualise and translate legal limbo to a wider audience. The image of
a girl, who they named Neha, was placed with a mirror for her face inside a clear
and transparent bubble with no exit (Figure 2). To look at Neha was to see one’s
self in the reflection. Ralph Ya explained the concept to me: ‘it is because
statelessness is constructed, anybody can be stateless in any time, and anybody
can find themself in the place of Neha’.84 I tried to imagine myself in the same
place as Neha, and it shocked me to find I could not imagine the same situation
for myself. Who could?
Neha is trapped inside a bubble, she cannot go outside, go to school or play. To
free her, Ralph Ya announced, we needed 46 Nepali passports. People who want
to help Neha had to pretend that they were stateless; they had to fill out documents
(birth certificate, citizenship certificate etc) and go through a series of stages to
obtain a passport. I also participated in this experiment. I found out that 46 was a
symbolic number, representing almost 4.6 million stateless children in the world.
I asked Ralph Ya, why the passport? ‘Well, do you know a better way to free them
from their situation of statelessness?’85 I did not reply, but I was thinking: if there
is no other way to free Neha this limbo, then this art experiment would not give a
solution that has not already been considered by academics and policymakers.
Regardless, it was rather a different way to show the situation and convey the
message.
82 See, eg, Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (n 27); Laura Van Waas and Melanie J
Khanna (eds), Solving Statelessness (Wolf Legal 2017); Chikera and Whiteman (n 31).
83 Informal conversation with David Cottrrell, Co-founder, Empathy and Risk (Mizanur
Rahman, Empathy and Risk, 24 June 2019).
84 Informal conversation with Ralph Ya, Artist, Empathy and Risk (Mizanur Rahman, 24 June
2019).
85 Informal conversation with Ralph Ya, Artist, Empathy and Risk (Mizanur Rahman, 26 June
2019).
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Figure 2: Neha, a stateless girl trapped inside a bubble.86
In the first stage of obtaining a passport, I had to fill a document entitled ‘Prove
That You Were Born, Even if You are Alive and a Breathing Human Being’. The
sarcastic tone of the title seemed like a challenge to the discretion the nation-state
has in deciding if you were born. It challenges the notion that a birth certificate is
needed when, in reality, you exist as a human. I found this piece quite interesting.
At the end of the ‘birth certificate’ in Figure 3 it was written:
Please present this fully accomplished form as evidence that you are not stateless.
Nothing is more important than a piece of paper as compared to your live presence
and actual existence, right?
These lines remain a critical reflection of the importance of state-sanctioned
documents.
It took me the entire three day conference to go through all stages needed to get
a ‘passport’. Sometimes, the officer played by the person in the passport office
was not there. Sometimes, the officer would not want to do the work. Sometimes
the photo I submitted was deemed inappropriate and I was asked to resubmit it.
Throughout the procedure I felt a sense of rejection and betrayal, regardless of my
86 Mizanur Rahman, Neha, A Stateless Girl Trapped inside a Bubble (Photo, World Conference
on Statelessness and Inclusion, 26–28 June 2019).
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knowledge that these steps were part of the experiment. The passport officer,
played by an activist associated with Empathy and Risk named Deepti from Nepal,
explained it to me:
We just wanted to show you a glimpse of what it feels like to be a stateless person,
knocking relentlessly on the door of the authority. It can take year after year;
generation after generation. In Nepal, stateless people face all of this harassment.87
I felt emotionally distressed listening to her, thinking of the reality of actual
stateless persons or groups. I promised myself then that I would dedicate myself
to the field of statelessness in my future career endeavours. Finally, she gave me
a passport and requested I put the passport in front of the bubble. I went there and
saw only 15 passports including my own. I wondered: what was happening? Was
it that people were not interested enough? In a discussion with Ralph Ya during a
coffee break, I asked him, ‘why were there only 15 passports?’ He laughed and
informed me that he had given the initial form to more than 150 participants
personally, but most of them got annoyed with the process. I realised this is how
the artist wanted people to have the experience of frustration. They could not take
three days, so how then do stateless persons go through such experiences year after
year?
Figure 3: Write your birth certificate and prove that you were born.88
87 Informal conversation with Deepti, activist (Mizanur Rahman, Empathy and Risk 28 June
2019).
88 Mizanur Rahman, Write Your Birth Certificate and Prove That You Were Born (Photo, World
Conference on Statelessness and Inclusion, 26–28 June 2019).
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On the third day morning, Ralph Ya made another announcement: ‘Dear
Participants, we still need 30 passports to free Neha, please cooperate’. Ralph
asked me to go to participants and motivate them to go through the process, which
I did. I remember two of the participants telling me that they tried to get the
passport but the process was too long and they got distracted. I told them that was
because the experiment wants to show people how devastating and dehumanising
the process was, they listened to me and hugged me. One of them said, ‘you are
right, sorry, I did not think that way, I am going to get it now’.89 By 5:00 PM
Ralph declared that they had received 46 passports and it was time to free Neha.
There were a lot of people in front of the bubble, taking pictures and talking. Ralph
Ya placed himself in front of the bubble, looking very happy. He thanked all of
the participants who went through the whole process. After that, he lifted the
bubble from the symbolic Neha. Everyone clapped and cheered. The person
standing near me was telling another participant,
this is nice, but it is also over-ambitious. If the state does not want to give them the
passport no way you can lift the bubble around them, which is the case now and I
am not sure if it will change.90
Another person replied,
it’s a shame that they are living in a bubble their whole life, I see her as a living
embodiment of every stateless child and imagining my children in such a bubble is
very frightening.91
I looked at the persons face and I saw sadness. In my opinion, this feeling of
empathy that arose from the participants was the main objective of this art
experiment.
Empathy has been generally described in literature as a ‘capacity’ to feel and
realise others’ state of mind and emotions. More generally it has been
characterised as ‘putting oneself into others’ shoes’.92 Empathy has been widely
recognised and used by feminist scholars to build affective solidarity, to facilitate
political transformation, to challenge the objectivity of knowledge and to promote
a different way of knowing things. For instance, Claire Hemmings states,
to know differently we have to feel differently. Feeling that something is amiss in
how one is recognised, feeling an ill fit with social descriptions, feeling
undervalued, feeling that same sense in considering others… .93
One of the major advocates of the feminist intersectionality approach, Patricia
Hill Collins states,
89 Conversation with an anonymous participant (Mizanur Rahman, World Conference on
Statelessness and Inclusion, 28 June 2019).
90 Observation note, reaction of an anonymous participant ((Mizanur Rahman, World
Conference on Statelessness and Inclusion, 28 June 2019).
91 ibid
92 See, eg, Cynthia V Ward, ‘A Kinder, Gentler Liberalism? Visions of Empathy in Feminist
and Communitarian Literature’ (1994) 61(3) University of Chicago Law Review 929; F
Ioannidou and Vaya Konstantikaki, ‘Empathy and Emotional Intelligence: What is it Really
About?’ (2008) 1(3) International Journal of Caring Sciences 118; Alison Bailey, ‘On
Intersectionality, Empathy, and Feminist Solidarity: A Reply to Naomi Zack’ (2009) 18(2)
The Journal of Peace and Justice Studies 14; Claire Hemmings, ‘Affective solidarity: Feminist
reflexivity and political transformation’ (2012) 13 Feminist Theory 147.
93 Claire Hemmings (n 68) 150.
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the ability to empathise is not only important for a feminist subject committed to
knowing differently but may also be a condition of being understood as trustworthy
by those within marginal communities used to being mis-represented.94
From my experience and observation, I felt ‘Freeing Neha’ succeeded in
creating empathy for the stateless by showing what it was like to be trapped in
‘legal limbo’. It was also critical to the state and questioned the legal process in
different ways. However, the solution it offered was centred on the state and
obtaining passports.
So, on the one hand, it certainly humanised the condition of statelessness and
provoked radical empathy, but on the other, it does not challenge the state-centred
discourses related to statelessness. Rather, it showed that the solution to
statelessness is still located within the nation-state framework and thus, does not
offer any different path from the legal approach — an emphasis on obtaining
passports as the fundamental means of Neha’s freedom from a ‘legal limbo’.
Unseen and Untouchables: Searching for Hope with Hope
Statelessness is often portrayed as a grim situation for stateless people. For
example, Marion Couldrey and Maurice Herson entitled one of their works on
statelessness as ‘No Legal Identity, Few Rights, Hidden from Society,
Forgotten’.95 This title draws a picture of stateless people and groups who are in
total despair, drowning in an ocean of sorrow and uncertainty. Literature on
statelessness has a tendency to talk about stateless people as if they are an
embodiment of passiveness; they do not possess any hope, they do not have any
agency, they cannot resist and as if they are only a category, a term or variable.
They are only defined by their legal status; their nationality and citizenship. In an
informal conversation, David Cotterell addressed this framing of stateless people:
‘There is a problem in the conceptualisation of stateless people. They are stateless,
but still, they are human beings, they have hope, they have family, they get angry
too, we need to recognise those’.96 In my observation notes ‘hope’ and ‘agency’
featured on many occasions. Both Creative Court and Empathy and Risk think
statelessness can be truly humanised through art that shows these fundamental
sides of human beings. In line with the previous Part, the following paragraphs
show how art and art interventions intend to represent hope and agency and, thus,
humanise the condition of statelessness. I also critically observed the following
artworks and practices to understand the type of knowledge they produce and how
they are constructed.
‘There is not a single human being in this world who has no hope, everyone
possesses some kind of hope’, says Manish Harijan, a Nepalese photographer and
artist for Empathy and Risk. Manish installed some of his photography to represent
the situation of stateless people and performed a live performance entitled ‘Unseen
and Untouchable’. I had several opportunities to meet with Manish. He explained
to me how his ideas on statelessness are closely related to his personal experiences.
His initial photographs were inspired by his personal experience of being
94 Claire Hemmings (n 69) 151, citing Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought:
Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (Routledge 2000).
95 See generally Marion Couldrey and Maurice Herson (eds) [2009] 32 Forced Migration
Review.
96 Informal conversation with David Cottrrell, Co-founder, Empathy and Risk (Mizanur
Rahman, Empathy and Risk, 29 June 2019).
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threatened and oppressed as an artist and member of the Harijan (‘untouchable’)
community that paints Hindu deities collaborating with western superheroes. His
work was not accepted for exhibition in Kathmandu. When he had the opportunity
to present his work on statelessness, he found his experience was quite similar to
stateless people. He said, ‘I found myself as unseen and untouchable in my society
and my situation is quite similar to the stateless person, who exist in reality, yet
they are invisible’.97
I was impressed by how he had translated his personal experience to
conceptualise the situation of stateless people. I asked him ‘why, then, do you
intend to represent your artwork in a conference on statelessness? Your artwork
derived primarily from your own experience, what do these artworks and
experiments have to do with statelessness?’ He replied,
My experience taught me that the ultimate vulnerabilities come from non-
recognition. When people are overlooked and ignored on the basis of religion,
caste, class, gender, ethnicity and nationality nothing could be worse. Statelessness
is the same situation of non-recognition, it is the ultimate non-recognition. People
or groups just do not belong anywhere, thus they become unseen, they become
untouchable, and they become ghosts. But they are human, they have hope and
need hope.98
I could not have agreed more.
On 26 June 2019, the first day of the conference, Creative Court and Empathy
and Risk scheduled Manish’s live performance during lunchtime. Manish sat on a
chair in front of a table wearing a huge bowl (made of steel) on his face. He was
moving his head very slowly, his hands were also moving around the table very
slowly like he was searching for something. I saw almost everyone was looking at
him. One of the participants brought food for him and placed the food in front of
him. The participant also sat in front of him, he asked Manish, ‘what do you need?
I brought you food, you can eat’. But Manish remained silent and kept moving his
hands around the table. The person looked disconcerted and said, ‘I am not sure
what you want’.99 The second person came and sat in front of him. She was talking
to him, at one moment she touched the moving hands of Manish and I saw his
hands firmly take the participant’s (Figure 4). I was standing close to them. She
then declared enthusiastically, ‘I get it, we need to give them a hand, so that they
do not feel abandoned’.100 Later, I also did the same, and he repeated his act as
earlier; as soon as my hand reached his, he held firmly. I felt that the goal of these
live performances was to create empathy for stateless persons, who you do not see,
cannot talk to, but need assistance regardless — they need humanity to step up for
their cause. They are searching for hope, even though the system makes it quite
impossible for them. Later I asked him, why did you hold hands and do nothing
else? He replied, ‘holding hands symbolises that they are searching for hope and
ways to end their stateless situation, maybe those hands were providing some
hope’.101
97 Informal conversation with Manish Harijan, artist (Mizuran Rahman, 22 June 2019)
98 ibid.
99 Reaction of an anonymous participant (Mizanur Rahman, World Conference on Statelessness
and Inclusion, 26 June 2019)
100 Reaction of an anonymous participant (Mizanur Rahman, World Conference on Statelessness
and Inclusion, 26 June 2019)
101 Informal conversation with Manish Harijan, artist (Mizanur Rahman, 26 June 2019)
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Figure 4: Searching for hope.102
In contrast to representing stateless people as frustrated, disappointed or as
those with ‘bare lives’, the art experiment employed by the organisations
emphasised one of the most basic human aspects — hope. ‘Hope itself is an
interesting concept and political idea. Without it there is despair and a sense of
futility’.103 For centuries, hope has been featured as a central theme in artistic,
philosophical and religious endeavours and explanations.104 More recently,
especially in the feminist school of thought, hope became a central theme. Rebecca
Coleman and Debra Ferreday argue, ‘[h]ope is central to marginal politics which
speaks of the desires for equality or simply for a better life’.105 A leading theorist
on hope defined it as something that, ‘sustains life in the face of despair’ and ‘the
drive or energy that embeds us in the world — in the ecology of life, ethics and
politics’.106 The live performance of Manish shows hope — which values life and
human aspiration over the unimaginable difficulties stateless people are facing —
because:
102 Mizanur Rahman, Searching for Hope (Photo, World Conference on Statelessness and
Inclusion, 26–28 June 2019).
103 Chris Barker, Brian Martin and Mary Zournazi, ‘Emotional Self-Management for Activists’
(2008) 9(4) Reflexive Practice 423, 430.
104 Nauja Kleist and Stef Jansen, ‘Introduction: Hope over Time — Crisis, Immobility and
Future-Making’ (2016) 27(4) History and Anthropology 373.
105 Rebecca Coleman and Debra Ferreday, ‘Introduction: Hope and Feminist Theory’ (2010)
14(4) Journal for Cultural Research 313.
106 Marry Zournazi, Hope: New Philosophies for Change (Pluto Press 2003) 14, 14–15.
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It is a basic human condition that involves belief and trust in the world. It is the
stuff of our dreams and desires, our ideas of freedom and justice and how we might
conceive life.107
In the conference, this particular art experiment tried to evoke a hope that does
not ignore the suffering of others; a positive hope that stateless people hold as
humans, which further succeeds in humanising the issue of statelessness.
In my opinion, however, it is worth noting that this conceptual art experiment
— of presenting the hope of stateless people — did not come directly from the
stateless persons themselves. As a result, we cannot know for sure if stateless
persons themselves would conceptualise it in the same way or how they would
have preferred to present it artistically. Rather, it is based on the very subjective
experiences of the artist; the combination of his experience and the dominant
narratives of statelessness (invisibility and of a people drowned in despair). In
short, it is not informed or translated from the experiences of stateless persons and
remains a top-down interpretation of stateless people’s experiences and
trajectories.
How Do You Survive in a World That Does Not Recognise You?:
Recognising ‘Agency’
It is commonly agreed that statelessness is a status of victimhood where stateless
persons are passive victims of circumstance.108 Creative Court has been working
on their new project to show the agency and resilience of stateless people, instead
of looking at them as ‘passive victims’. The last two months of my internship were
solely focused on Creative Court’s statelessness project. I was often engaged in
discussion with Rabiaa and participated in six concept development meetings
alongside the other members of Creative Court. During the first concept
development meeting, Rabiaa declared that her idea was to focus on the
perceptions and activities through which stateless persons connect themselves
with a world that does not recognise them, then translate it using an artistic
medium to visualise it.109 She also told me her initial idea was not to focus on
stateless people’s vulnerabilities and sufferings, rather their agency and
practices.110 She was interested and invested in the situation of Western Sahrawi,
where a group of stateless persons currently live in an occupied territory of the
Moroccan desert. Rabiaa gave me an interview to transcribe, one which she
conducted with a stateless person from Western Sahrawi, Drik.111
In the interview, Drik shed light on the many aspects of their stateless life. Drik
expressed a strong sense of identity regarding the Western Sahrawi community.
According to him, Sahrawi culture is about the words, stories, poetry and advice
of their wise men, they pass it down through generations. They are nomadic,
constantly searching for water. He emphasised that even though they are living in
a camp, in the middle of a desert, under an occupied territory, frozen in a status
quo, they remain survivors. He said, ‘we are not stateless, the oppressors made us.
107 ibid 12.
108 See Bloom, Tonkiss and Cole, ‘Introduction’ (n 27) 3.
109 Concept development meeting with Rabiaa Benlahbib, Director, Creative Court (Mizanur
Rahman, Creative Court 12 July 2019).
110 ibid.
111 In order to protect the person’s identity, I am using a pseudonym.
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We suffered a lot, but we exist, they cannot take it away from us’.112 Drik also
strongly believes in Sahrawi identity, and stated that while they do not have much,
they care strongly about who they are. He also mentioned that they protect their
identity despite all the suffering. Some of them applied for Moroccan Nationality
for money and comfort, but the majority would not accept them back into the
community; the community would not think that they are Sahrawi anymore.113 As
I was listening to the interview, I felt a pain for Drik and his people. I immediately
thought of over a million stateless Rohingya refugee people who reside in my
country because their identity was stripped away as they suffered persecution in
their country of origin, Myanmar. However, towards the end of the interview,
Rabiaa asked Drik if he could connect the Sahrawi people with the plant world.
Drik took some time and then suggested that they are like cacti. They survive in a
desert with barely any resources.114
After the interview I worked with Rabiaa to translate Drik’s perception and
conception of the Western Sahrawi community. She wanted to visually interpret
the concepts therein through the plant metaphor. We discussed whether the cacti
could represent the Western Sahrawi community and Drik’s idea of identity,
agency and survival.115 I researched cacti and after reading about their
characteristics I was also convinced that the situation Drik described could be
interpreted as such. Found in deserts, cacti can survive in extremely difficult
environments; to survive they have adapted by adopting distinctive physical and
behavioural mechanisms. Cacti are drought resistant, do not have any leaves which
reduces transpiration (loss of water in the air), they can store water in their long
roots from a single period of rainfall and can use it for years.116 Rabiaa also
informed me that there are also specific types of desert cacti that can move through
the desert.117 Hence, Creative Court decided to use cacti as a metaphor to visualise
and translate agency and represent the resilient nature of Western Sahrawi stateless
people (Figure 5).
112 Interview with Drik (Rabiaa Benlahbib, transcribed 20 July 2019).
113 ibid.
114 ibid.
115 Concept development meeting with Rabiaa Benlahbib, Director, Creative Court (Mizanur
Rahman, Creative Court 22 July 2019).
116 For details, see Ravikiran Kulloli and Suresh Kumar, ‘Conservation of Cacti in the Desert
Botanical Garden, Jodhpur, India’ (2017) 8(2) International Journal of Environmental
Science 172, 179.
117 Concept development meeting with Rabiaa Benlahbib, Director, Creative Court (Mizanur
Rahman, Creative Court 25 July 2019).
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Figure 5: Visualising stateless people as cacti.118
The Creative Court intended to bring out the issue of agency. Agency is defined
by Gell as something
attributable to those persons (and things …) who/which are seen as initiating casual
sequences of a particular type, that is, events caused by acts of mind or will or
intention … independently of the state of the physical universe’.119 Anthony
Giddens defined agency as people’s ability to act in a certain way where multiple
courses of action are possible.120
118 ‘How to Recognise a Tree’, Creative Court (Web Page)
<https://www.creativecourt.org/index.php/portfolio/work-in-progress/>.
119 Gell (n 23) 16.
120 Robert Layton, ‘Art and Agency: A Reassessment’ (2003) 9(3) Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 447, 451.
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For Giddens, constraints enable people to exercise their agency.121 The interview
with Drik suggests that the stateless people of Western Sahrawi do not see
themselves as stateless, and most of them do not have any intention of accepting
Moroccan citizenship despite their suffering. The will to resist against the
condition, to survive and to protect their identity, clearly shows the agency of the
Western Sahrawi people — qualities that Drik himself thinks emulate cacti.
Contending with Deirdre Brennan,122 I came to realise that these theories on
agency can play a significant role in understanding the concepts of definition and
self-identification. By asking questions such as ‘what are the implications of
portraying stateless people as the victims? Invisible? Legal ghosts? People of
nowhere?’ ‘In what circumstances do people want to be defined as stateless
people?’ Or, ‘in what space can stateless people be seen as having and practising
agency?’123 Similarly, universally portraying stateless people as ‘victims’,
‘nowhere people’, ‘submissive’, ‘people with bare lives’ and waiting for
‘citizenship’ ignores their complicated and contextual history, identity and culture.
Through the use of an artistic approach, Creative Court intended to go beyond
these portrayals and wanted to represent the agency of the Western Sahrawi
stateless people by portraying them as cacti; strong, resilient and able to survive
in harsh environments.
Despite their intention, the ‘agency’ perspective adopted by Creative Court
suffers similar limitations to that of ‘hope’, where there is a clear absence of first
hand stateless perspectives on artworks. Creative Court’s agency argument, and
their act of showing stateless people as a resilient and aware group of survivors, is
based in a single chance encounter with a stateless person. The photographs and
artworks presenting such agency were not developed with stateless people, their
concern and consent were not counted in the process. So, the question can be
asked, who represented whom and how? Creative Court’s ideas and knowledge
did not arise from empirical research with the Western Sahrawi population
residing inside the Moroccan territory. Again, it was a different way of seeing and
imagining, but it followed the same path of totalising the experience of the
Western Sahrawi stateless population, based on the view of one particular member
of the community. This is a nice idea to show the agency of stateless people and
recognise their existence, but it lacks empirical grounds. With all the concerns
regarding the humanisation of statelessness, when Creative Court sees stateless
people through plant metaphors, in a way, they also dehumanise stateless people
— their experiences become objectified when translated into plants or artworks.
This is a paradox created by the organisation.
CONCLUSION
Throughout this article, I have analysed an art-based approach towards
statelessness to show how it is different from the currently dominant frameworks.
These dominant discourses on statelessness emphasise a lack of legal bond
between the state and the individual. The personal experiences and perceptions of
stateless people are mostly invisible in such discourses. Stateless persons are
perceived as ‘legal ghosts’, as if they do not exist, and as vulnerable and passive
121 Anthony Giddens, The Constitution of Society (Polity Press 1984) 173.
122 Deirdre Brennan, ‘Statelessness and the Feminist Toolbox: Another Man Made Problem with
a Feminist Solution?’ (2019) 24(2) Tilburg Law Review 170.
123 See ibid 172.
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victims. This dominant framing dehumanises stateless people. Art-based
approaches propose to set out different narratives and discourses of statelessness,
focusing on the human aspects of being stateless to humanise the issue. Creative
Court and its partner intended to bring forward the vulnerabilities, hope and
agency of stateless people, as well as subtly question current understandings. This
art-based approach intended to present alternative perspectives on statelessness. It
framed statelessness as a ‘human’ issue’, rather a mere ‘legal’ issue. I
demonstrated, through my analysis, that the artistic approach recognises basic
human aspects concerning stateless people and goes beyond how statelessness is
dominantly framed and represented. This reflects Creative Court and Empathy and
Risk’s principal objective of framing and representing statelessness in a
humanising way, so that other people can connect themselves to stateless persons
through empathy. I felt the art-based approach succeeds in doing so. However,
careful analysis of these artworks shows that even if the framing of statelessness
is humanised, the solution often remains a legal one, lacking a view of stateless
people themselves. Nevertheless, this artistic approach can be seen as an effort to
study statelessness from a different angle that shows human aspects of the stateless
situation.
Finally, I want to address three issues that are worthy of further exploration.
First, I both felt and observed that the conference artworks succeeded in generating
in the participants, including myself, an empathy towards stateless people.
However, I am not sure how these artworks would have been received by a
different audience who did not necessarily possess an interest in, or knowledge of,
the issue of statelessness. The conference itself was about statelessness,
participants were invited selectively based on their expertise or engagement in the
issue. Therefore, I felt it was relatively easy to generate such empathy in
participants that were already invested in statelessness in some way. What would
have happened in a different location or setting, with people who are not generally
aware of, or concentrated on, statelessness? It would be interesting to gauge the
responses of more general audiences. Second, the artworks I have observed were
not community-led artworks. While the artists and the organisations met with
some stateless people, collected their stories and translated them into artworks, we
do not know if the stateless persons themselves would represent their stories, hope,
agency, identity and resilience in the same manner. How would they have done it?
Future researchers could think about engaging themselves in a community-led art
project to see the difference. Third, there is a growing concern regarding ‘the
ethnographic turn in art’.124 Statelessness is a very complex issue; stateless
persons and groups experience statelessness in different ways and in different
socio-cultural, economic and political contexts. It would be interesting to combine
ethnographic knowledge in art-based approaches to grasp these perceptions,
practices and meanings of statelessness. Thus, I believe an ethnographic turn in
art practices regarding statelessness can further enhance the cause of humanising
statelessness. Community-led art projects, and the utilisation of ethnographic
knowledge to translate them into artistic representations of statelessness, could
generate radical empathy for the stateless people. In turn, this could influence
124 See, eg, Anna Grimshaw and Amanda Ravetz, ‘The Ethnographic Turn — and After: A
Critical Approach towards the Realignment of Art and Anthropology’ (2015) 23(4) Social
Anthropology 428; Kris Rutten, An van Dienderen and Ronald Soetaert, ‘Revisiting the
Ethnographic Turn in Contemporary Art’ (2013) 27(5) Critical Arts 459
<https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02560046.2013.855513>.
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policymakers to see this issue not only from a legal and political position, but also
from a humanist one. This was, and is, one of the main objectives of Creative
Court and Empathy and Risk.
