 I'm Salvatore Bobonis, and this week's problem of the week is statelessness. The modern world is composed of countries. In fact, the division of the world into countries is a major distinguishing feature of modernity. And countries are governed by states. So what happens if a person somehow falls between the cracks of the world's countries? What happens if a person is not recognized as a citizen by any of the world's states? And what happens if a country just doesn't have a state to run it? All of these situations can result in statelessness. Statelessness is a serious social problem affecting around 10 million people scattered throughout the world. A state is a legal bureaucratic entity that governs a country and its population. For example, Germany is a country in Europe, but Germany has had many different states running it over the years. First Imperial Germany, then the Weimar Republic, then Nazi Germany, then West Germany, and now today the Federal Republic of Germany. We're all states that govern the territory of Germany in Europe. The Federal Republic of Germany has a government, just like all states do, that can change from year to year. Right now the Chancellor is Angela Merkel, but next year the Chancellor could be somebody else. The government changes, but the state continues. The state is a legal bureaucratic entity that collects taxes, that sends out social security checks, that enforces the law, and all of that goes on even when governments change year by year. A stateless person is a person who does not hold citizenship in any state. Most of us have citizenship granted by the state in which we live or the state in which we were born. Some people have citizenship in multiple states, but a small number of people are not eligible for citizenship in any state. This usually occurs when a state categorically excludes people from citizenship. Statelessness is a particular problem for the Palestinian people who are refugees from the 1948 creation of the State of Israel. Many Palestinian people live in states like Jordan and Lebanon and Syria on the borders of Israel. But those people are not necessarily citizens of Jordan, Lebanon, or Syria, yet they have no other state to be a citizen of. Even Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza are not citizens of any state because the West Bank and Gaza are territories they are not recognized as states in the interstate international system. A second group of stateless people are people of Russian nationality who found themselves living outside the borders of Russia when the Soviet Union was dissolved in 1991. These are mainly people who were citizens of the Soviet Union, of Russian language and Russian background, who lived in places like Latvia, Estonia, or in some cases Central Asia when the Soviet Union was dissolved. Mostly those in Latvia and Estonia wanted to stay on in those countries which eventually became members of the European Union, but Latvia and Estonia will only grant them citizenship rights if they learn the local language and pledge allegiance to the new countries of Latvia and Estonia. Many people of Russian descent are unable or unwilling to learn the new local languages of the countries in which they live. And thus have been denied statehood or denied citizenship in the countries in which they live. Yet they are not Russian citizens either. They are people of Russian background who live in other countries. Sometimes people become stateless due to contradictory citizenship laws. This often happens in cases of migration. Some countries grant citizenship on the basis of parents nationality. Other countries grant citizenship on the basis of birth. If you are born in a country that grants citizenship on the basis of parents nationality, but your parents are from another country, you may find that you don't qualify for citizenship where you were born, and you don't qualify for citizenship in the countries of your parents' birth either, and that can leave you as a stateless person. The United Nations has been able to document at least 3.5 million stateless people, but it estimates that there are up to 10 million. No one knows the exact number for sure. I would suggest that there are actually many more stateless people in the world if instead of taking a legal definition of statelessness, we take a social problems definition. When we move from the theoretical world of international law to the practical world of social problems, many people are effectively stateless even if they legally have states of citizenship. Take the difficult case of Syria in 2016. The Syrian state only controls about one-third of the populated area of Syria, the area marked in blue-green on this BBC map. The rest of Syria is controlled by rebel groups and other separatist factions. In international law, only the government of Syria can issue Syrian passports and confer Syrian citizenship. So what happens to the two-thirds of Syrians who live in places that are outside the jurisdiction of the government of Syria? In international law, they are not stateless, but in practice, they can't get passports and they have no government services. They pay no taxes to the government and they receive no benefits from the government. In addition, there are now millions of Syrians who live outside Syria as refugees. Many of them are also in effect stateless. So statelessness is much more of a practical problem or a much bigger practical problem than the theoretical status of statelessness in international law would imply. In fact, there are entire states that are clearly states from a practical social policy perspective that are not recognized as states in international law, thereby leaving their residents effectively stateless. For example, in the Caucasus, the country of Georgia in international law is recognized as having the boundaries marked here. But there are two territories of Georgia, Abkhazia and South Ossetia, that are effectively independent of Georgia and are not governed by the Georgian state. Both Abkhazia and South Ossetia have independent states that are recognized and supported by the Russian Federation. There are about 300,000 people in Abkhazia and another 50,000 people in South Ossetia. These people have passports issued by Abkhazia and South Ossetia, but these passports are only recognized in Russia and a small number of other countries. In effect, the entire populations of Abkhazia and South Ossetia are stateless from the perspective of the rest of the world. And if inside their own countries, they are members of their respective states. There are also large stateless populations in the making. One notorious example are the Rohingya people of western Myanmar. The Rohingya people are mainly Muslim people with close historical cultural ties to areas that are now inside the country of Bangladesh. Now, I should note that the name Myanmar is what the country calls itself, but the United States and many other countries do not accept the name Myanmar and still use the colonial name Burma for the country. Similarly, the Rohingya live in what is officially called Rakhine state by the Myanmar government, but many countries, including the United States, still use the old colonial name Arakhan state. In any case, the Rohingya live in this area in western Myanmar and also in cities in other areas around the country. There are around two million Rohingya people who are denied citizenship by the government of Myanmar and have been denied citizenship for some 35 years. They are stateless in the sense that they can't get passports and they are denied government services by their own government, yet they live in Myanmar. They have not left the country and become stateless persons in the rest of the world. The rest of the world considers the Rohingya people to belong to the Myanmar state and be citizens of Myanmar. Human rights activists regularly call on Myanmar to extend full citizenship to the Rohingya minority, but these calls don't really solve the problem. Since nobody is willing to force Myanmar to extend full citizenship rights to the Rohingya, in fact, what would it even mean to force Myanmar to extend full rights? No country is going to invade Myanmar in order to protect the Rohingya. No country is going to place extreme economic sanctions on Myanmar that might push Myanmar to extend citizenship rights to the Rohingya. And even if countries were willing to do that, we should question whether or not that would be correct. Would it make sense to punish the people of the entire country of Myanmar because the Myanmar state refuses to grant citizenship rights to two million of the residents of Myanmar? That's a difficult question. We could offer refugee placements as displaced persons to the people of Rohingya background in Myanmar, but no country wants to take in two million Rohingya and give them asylum. So what do we do? This is a very difficult question. In fact, even if Myanmar did give into international pressure and give formal citizenship rights to the Rohingya people, it's very unlikely that the Rohingya would be accepted by Myanmar society. There have been massacres of Rohingya in Myanmar over the last five years, and there's every reason to believe that massacres and severe discrimination would continue even if the Rohingya were granted citizenship. So if these are not ways that we can solve the Rohingya problem, what can we do? Well, I think that first we should ask, who are we? I'm delivering these lectures as an American university professor at the University of Sydney. I live in a very privileged place with a very privileged life. I am not willing personally to host two million Rohingya asylum seekers. I know that the countries of Australia and the United States, with which I'm connected, are not willing to take in two million people, and yet if we don't take in two million people, how can we expect Myanmar to adequately perform its responsibilities? After all, Myanmar has just come out of five decades of military rule. It's a post-colonial country that is barely held together as it is, fighting a major insurgency in the north of the country. Income per capita in Myanmar is just $1,500 per year, and the government itself, the state of Myanmar, collects only 4% of GDP in tax revenues. That's among the lowest tax takes in the world. To put that in perspective, the United States, which is a comparatively low tax country, takes about 35% of GDP in taxes. Most European countries take between 50% and 60% of GDP in taxes. The Myanmar state hardly has the capacity to solve the problems that exist within Myanmar, of which the Rohingya problem is only one of many. Three takeaways. First, statelessness is a serious and growing problem that results when states deny citizenship to some of their country's residents. Second, civil wars like that in Syria can make millions of people effectively stateless, even if under international law they theoretically have citizenship. And third, the Rohingya people of western Myanmar are a stateless people in the making that are clearly on the road to statelessness, unless something is done very soon, either to grant them citizenship rights within Myanmar or to accept them and give them asylum in other countries. Thank you for watching this podcast on statelessness. To subscribe to my newsletter, go to salvatorbebonus.com, where you will also find topical articles on current affairs posted.