Can a society benefit from being stateless?

A few people have voluntarily renounced their citizenship. They include Mike Gogulski, who renounced his US citizenship and burned his passport. This is a radical approach, as stateless persons are not treated well in today’s world. They live under precarious conditions, often without basic protection, healthcare or other rights. But some people still give up their citizenship.

This fact alone should remind us of the problems and tensions in our current concept of democracy.

Our world is defined by major imbalances of power, connected to inequalities in wealth, education, health care, security and so on. The idea of the nation state looms large in this imbalance. Some believe that nation states with central governments impose authoritarian structures on their people, thus perpetuating inequalities.

This is not just because third party representation through a government does not realize the wishes of the citizens, it is more about the fundamental structure of society. Just as the concept of gender divides people into male and female categories, the concept of the state divides people into the governors and the governed. A hierarchy is imposed, leading to imbalances of power. This hierarchical thinking fundamentally influences how we perceive and conceive of the world.

But many people perceive the state as oppressive and do not identify with it. Society and state can be two different things. So can society be liberated from the state? Can a society benefit from being stateless?

Anarchy as a utopia

I wish no power over you.
I wish that you have no power over me.

– An anarchist’s declaration by Mike Gogulski, who renounced his US citizenship and is now stateless

An organized form of society without state, hierarchies or borders – a society of actual freedom – is not a new idea. Various anti-authoritarian ideas have been put forward, in which people have proposed exercising democracy without a state. For example, Rojava in Syria, the concept of democratic confederalism, and the ideas put forward by intellectuals such as Noam Chomsky.

Anarchism proposes a form of self government in which society is organized into groups and communities with representatives, but without any hierarchy. Anarchy is about individual empowerment, not about delegating power to the government. Closing the gap between governors and governed would restore political agency, putting power back into the hands of the people. If people were actively shaping society, at a certain point the state would become obsolete, fostering solidarity between people.

People instinctively organize themselves. They do it within states, but they could also do it under other circumstances. We can imagine society as a single organic, rather than architectural, structure – a web, not a building.

If society were differently organized, nobody would have to work. And with a bit of optimism, we could bring this future about. A future where nobody has to fight just to earn enough money to survive. A society in which people have overcome their lust for power.

Of course, the concept of anarchism is not without its issues. It is not clear how people would organize themselves, or how safety, security and stability would be maintained. But it is a concept worth considering, especially in today’s world where the gap between rich and poor is expanding, and the ongoing presence of conflict suggest the current model isn’t working.

Today, we could argue, only utopia is realistic.

The vast majority of stateless people do not choose to be that way.

There are many reasons why people become stateless – or are born that way. They include conflicting nationality laws, states becoming newly independent and the legacy of colonisation.

Here are four cases that illustrate the problems that arise when you lose the protection of a state.

Undocumented lives

MEXICO

There are more than 10 million stateless people globally, according to official estimates. Alejandro’s mother is one of them. Because of a lack of documentation, she is now in a nursing home in Mexico even though she has two sons who are US citizens. On paper she has the right to US citizenship, but in practice she can’t prove her identity. This means she must live separately from her family.

The search for identity

Berzan is from Kurdistan. His family, living in North Syria, belong to a group of 150,000 Kurds who lost their citizenship after the 1962 Syrian census, when Kurdish people were registered as foreigners. For this reason, Berzan was born without a nationality.

Anil belongs to the Nepalese minority in Bhutan and was born without nationality. He was only five years old when ethnic conflict broke out in Bhutan and the Nepali-speaking population in the south of the country had to flee. After Anil’s father died in the conflict, his uncle took him to Nepal where he could go to school.

How many are stateless?

There are estimated to be as many as 15 million stateless people globally. But only 3.5 million have been officially counted, across 80 countries.

Three quarters of them live in just five countries:

1. Myanmar
2. Côte d’Ivoire
3. Thailand
4. Zimbabwe
5. Latvia

The limits of statelessness statistics

Official statistics on statelessness are limited. They do not describe the full scale of the issue.

• Not all countries are included: Official statistics only include data from 80 of the 193 UN member states. The estimate of 10 million stateless people worldwide is based on an extrapolation from the 3.5 million known to be stateless.

• Not everyone without a country is counted as stateless: The figure of 10 million refers to those who fall under the UNHCR’s statelessness protection mandate. In addition to this, the Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI) estimated that at the end of 2013 there were also around 1.5 million stateless refugees and around 3.5 million stateless Palestinians worldwide. This would bring the global total to around 15 million.

• Stateless people are very difficult to count: Data gaps, inconsistencies in the way people are counted, and differences in the definitions of statelessness between nations all blur the picture. In some European countries there is a problem of persons being reported as holding an ‘unknown nationality’, which further obscures the true number affected by statelessness.