Citizenship and Statelessness through a Superdiversity Lens

Abstract This chapter investigates citizenship and statelessness through the lens of superdiversity. Earlier scholarly literature defined citizenship as a legal status, which is a predisposition for individuals to possess certain rights. By contrast, statelessness was understood as a legal status lacking these rights. Later works have argued that not all citizens have equal access to citizenship rights, and that not all populations are equally vulnerable to statelessness. Several policy papers have connected this specifically to ethnic discrimination, since certain ethnic minorities have a hindered access to citizenship rights or to citizenship status altogether and end up as stateless. While not diminishing the importance of ethnic discrimination, this chapter argues that other factors should be considered when contemplating the connection between citizenship and rights, and between statelessness and rightlessness, most notably, how these factors are intertwined in dynamic power relations. The chapter applies a superdiversity approach to examine the factors that accompany ethnic inequalities and contribute to the dissociation of citizenship from rights. It also shows that statelessness entails different degrees of access to rights rather than simply being a state of rightlessness.