Tucker, Jason | 2024
The Statelessness & Citizenship Review, 6(1), 124-129
Identifying the minimum content of nationality (‘MCN’), the inalienable core elements or conditions of citizenship without which one should be considered stateless, has remained a non-starter in stateless studies. From a normative legal perspective,identifying this is seen as a near impossible task. Even attempting to do so has been described as potentially openingPandora’s Box on the debate about where we should draw the line between citizenship and statelessness. The ensuing endless debate has the potential tostall and sidetrack critical work on statelessness.This is problematic as the dominant narrative of how statelessness is understood, in both scholarship and practice, is as a lack of citizenship, as per the 1954Conventionrelating to the Status of Stateless Persons (‘1954 Convention’)definition.3Yet, the point at which citizenship stops and statelessness starts is very unclear. While one can point to many nuanced approaches to citizenship and statelessness that recognise the polyvalence, fluidity and interrelatedness of these two social constructs,4the 1954 Conventionand how this is interpreted, as seen in policy and practice, remains very unclear regarding the MCN. The lack of ability to reconcile the 1954 Conventiondefinition of statelessness with the messiness of statelessness and citizenshipmanifests in the creation of various labels to try to patch over the blurry MCN, for examplede facto statelessness, risk of statelessnessandlegal invisibility pending recognition of citizenship. [...]
