Stateless Histories project brings understudied subject to light

UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Laura Robson, the William L. and Donna F. Oliver-McCourtney Professor of History at Penn State and current fellow of the Washington, D.C.-based Wilson Center international policy think tank, considers statelessness to be one of the most understudied and underdiscussed subjects in both history and policy circles.

“Statelessness — where a person cannot claim citizenship or nationality in any country — is a lived experience for many millions of people,” she said. “It often means that a person cannot access work permits, education or social services. They have limited capacity to move around the world without documentation, which can be a profoundly debilitating condition.”

Robson has joined forces with colleague Jennifer Dueck, the Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair in the Modern History of the Middle East and North Africa at the University of Manitoba, to encourage scholarship and awareness about statelessness. Using funds from their endowed professorships, the scholars created “Stateless Histories,” a digital humanities project that includes essays, podcasts, documents, and videos that explore little-known histories of statelessness in the modern era.

People can become stateless in a number of ways, Robson explained. One can be refugee from a state that no longer exists or a person who is not recognized by the state in which they were born. For example, the Rohingya people – many of whom fled their homes in Myanmar in 2017 to avoid persecution – are denied citizenship through a Myanmar nationality law enacted in 1982.

Robson also referenced the European Jewish experience of the 1930s when Jews were expelled from Nazi Germany and stripped of their citizenship.

“There’s been a big explosion in refugee studies in the last 20 years or so, where people have come to understand refugee history as one of the defining characteristics and experiences of the modern era,” she said. “But there hasn’t been a corresponding focus on statelessness, which is a related but different phenomenon. To the extent people think about statelessness, they tend think of it as having a very specific origin point in midcentury Europe, but statelessness has been a widespread experience across the world throughout the 20th century.”

Robson said the Stateless Histories project has two goals — to tell the stories of stateless people across the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, and to get people to think more deeply about how nations function and who they leave out.

“The project points out a number of problems with how we understand citizenship and what it can and cannot do,” she said. “We want to reveal what people’s experiences tell us about global order, about migration, about diaspora, and about the experience of citizenship and non-citizenship to shed light on lesser-known aspects of statelessness.”  

The Stateless Histories project origin

Robson said she and Dueck, who met at a National History Center seminar at the Library of Congress some years ago, were trying to think of something “valuable, collaborative and public” they could do during the COVID-19 pandemic. While the project first took the shape as a more conventional workshop, the scholars realized a digital humanities project would reach a much wider audience.

“Our idea has been to collect case studies and stories from scholars who are experts in different parts of the globe and regions and territories and time periods, to give us an idea of the global and temporal scope of the phenomenon of statelessness in the modern era,” Robson said.

Among the collection’s many stories is one about a Somalian refugee who was trying to cross the border into Uganda.

“He had no documentation of any kind and ended up appealing to a camp authority to cross the border and become a refugee by using the only identification he had – his ID from working at the Coca Cola factory,” Robson said. “The story demonstrates the desperation of people who are trying to move around without appropriate identity papers, which is a really common experience.”

While the website is certainly for the interested public, Robson explained, “our special hope is that this project will provide a place where scholars and students of refugeedom and statelessness can meet up with practitioners – people who work in government, NGOs, policy-oriented organizations. It is a space for a meeting of minds between academic and non-academic communities.

“We’re not suggesting specific policy outcomes with this project, but we would like to provide some historical context for people to think about alternative political possibilities,” she continued. “This is something that historians are really good at. History demonstrates all the ways in which things have been different in the past and therefore can be different in the future. These deep dives into the past are so crucial because they tell us there is nothing inevitable about how we run the world. It is possible to imagine political formulations that would change the parameters of this issue and change people’s lives.”

“Modern history has been so profoundly shaped by nation states and all of the ideological implications of nationalism that it’s easy to forget that forging nations, or reforging them, leaves many people outside them,” said Michael Kulikowski, Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Classics and head of the Department of History. “Finally, we have a project that makes the stateless visible, that takes seriously the involuntary migrants, the displaced persons, those left stranded in a nation to which they cannot belong. Stateless Histories is an overdue reckoning with one of modernity’s great tragedies, and it is, sadly, more timely than ever. Professor Robson, one of the most distinguished scholars to have joined our department in recent years, is a pioneer in uncharted scholarly territory, staking out a whole new field of knowledge. We’re very lucky to have her.”

“This project would be impossible without the generous funding the Oliver-McCourtney Professorship has given me,” concluded Robson. “It is absolutely necessary to have these kinds of resources in order to conceive of large-scale projects that have the potential to have a real impact across both academic and non-academic communities. I am so grateful to have had the opportunity and resources to undertake this work.”

Visit www.statelesshistories.org for more information.