The story of how a much-contested legal category-statelessness-transformed the international legal order and redefined the relationship between states and their citizens.

Two world wars left millions stranded in Europe. The collapse of empires and the rise of independent states in the twentieth century produced an unprecedented number of people without national belonging and with nowhere to go. Mira Siegelberg's innovative history weaves together ideas about law and politics, rights and citizenship, with the intimate plight of stateless persons, to explore how and why the problem of statelessness compelled a new understanding of the international order in the twentieth century and beyond.

In the years following the First World War, the legal category of statelessness generated novel visions of cosmopolitan political and legal organization and challenged efforts to limit the boundaries of national membership and international authority. Yet, as Siegelberg shows, the emergence of mass statelessness ultimately gave rise to the rights regime created after World War II, which empowered the territorial state as the fundamental source of protection and rights, against alternative political configurations.

Today we live with the results: more than twelve million people are stateless and millions more belong to categories of recent invention, including refugees and asylum seekers. By uncovering the ideological origins of the international agreements that define categories of citizenship and non-citizenship, Statelessness better equips us to confront current dilemmas of political organization and authority at the global level.

About the Author
Mira L. Siegelberg is University Lecturer in the History of International Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and a past member of the Princeton Society of Fellows.

Reviews
Illuminating and rich...Over 10 million people are stateless today, and governments seem hell-bent on increasing their numbers...Siegelberg's account offers a sober corrective to dewy-eyed stories in which the formation of postwar international institutions like the U.N. curtailed state-inflicted cruelties. -- Udi Greenberg * New Republic *
Siegelberg's book is the first to consider the evolution of statelessness as a legal, humanitarian, and philosophical matter. It's an essential contribution to scholarship on the subject, and it could not appear at a more fitting time. -- Atossa Araxia Abrahamian * New York Review of Books *
Drawing on a wide variety of archival sources...she documents how the problem of statelessness informed theories of human rights and sovereignty...A comprehensive overview of international perspectives and experiences concerning statelessness and the modern state's power to exclude. -- Laura van Waas and Natalie Brinham * Project Syndicate *
Statelessness is a remarkable work of scholarship...This is an extraordinarily erudite historical study, a seminal work which fills critical gaps in the existing literature...Essential background for the twenty-first century reader. -- Brad K. Blitz * Society *
A masterful work of international legal history...provides invaluable context to the development of the modern legal order and the place of the individual within it...we would do well to reexamine our protection frameworks from this historical perspective. -- Melissa Stewart * American Journal of International Law *
Demonstrate[s] just how late the conceptual and legal borders of our political world map were drawn...Statelessness concerns the ways in which international lawyers and political scientists have responded to the modern phenomenon of exclusion and displacement that characterized much of the twentieth century and that forced new ways of thinking about the role of borders and boundaries of membership. -- Ruth Balint * Australian Book Review *
[An] important study. -- Francis Wade * The Baffler *
Compelling...This is an impressive work that shows the impact of legal thought on social reality and the significance of possessing a (legal) identity-both at the beginning of the twentieth century and today...Siegelberg's text is an important contribution, as she makes the understudied topic of statelessness intelligible and, on top of that, demonstrates how it intertwines with other foundational political concepts, such as sovereignty, citizenship, and human rights. -- Isadora Dullaert * LSE Review of Books *
A necessary exploration of the development of statelessness as a Western philosophical and jurisprudential concept in the early and mid-twentieth century...A must-read for scholars and legal professionals studying citizenship and/or working on immigration, political theory, and human rights as it provides a needed engagement with statelessness as a contentious concept...A fascinating and important read. -- Brittany Lehman * EuropeNow *
A fine-grained history of statelessness. -- James H. McDonald * New York Journal of Books *
A huge group of essentially disenfranchised, homeless people emerged after 1920. Siegelberg's book tackles discussions of their precarious legal status through a fascinating wealth of primary sources. The historian...not only tracks the scholarly discourse on international law, but also analyzes court cases and draws on manifestos and brochures from international organizations. She also cites novels that center on stateless people and their fate. -- Milos Vec * Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung *
Mira Siegelberg demonstrates that the question of statelessness, now a relatively minor aspect of a larger refugee crisis, in fact lies at the heart of the transformations in legal consciousness that produced the fragile and often ambiguous postwar international rights regime. Statelessness is an important book and a magnificent achievement. -- Mark Mazower, author of Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century
A book equal parts compelling and sobering, Statelessness lives up to the importance of its topic. Siegelberg writes conceptual history for our twenty-first-century world. -- Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, University of California, Berkeley
Mira Siegelberg's relentless and imaginative exploration of statelessness in the twentieth century ranges across several disciplines, languages, and legal traditions. Along the way, she manages to recast core episodes in the history of modern political and legal thought. And, even more, she models an ambitious approach to a critical history of international law. -- Hendrik Hartog, Princeton University
This insightful and well-written work opens up a new perspective on the formation of our present international order and the place of individuals within it. With mass migration caused by wars and, in the future, by climate change, the problem of statelessness is not going to go away. In a moment when we need to think again about the relationship between states and individuals, this book is a good place from which to start. -- Martti Koskenniemi, author of The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870-1960


Awards
Winner of Francesco Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical International Relations 2022 (United States) and ASIL Certificates of Merit 2022 (United States). Joint winner of Jerry Bentley Book Prize 2021 (United States). Runner-up for Laura Shannon Prize 2023 (United States).



Book Information
ISBN 9780674976313
Author Mira L. Siegelberg
Format Hardback
Page Count 328
Imprint Harvard University Press
Publisher Harvard University Press