Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar: Statelessness of Religious and Ethnic Minority Groups

FASKIANOS: Welcome to the Council on Foreign Relations Religion and Foreign Policy Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president for the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. 

As a reminder, today’s webinar is on the record and the audio, video, and transcript will be available on CFR’s website, CFR.org, and the Apple Podcasts channel, Religion and Foreign Policy. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy.  

We’re delighted to have Laura van Waas and Henri Barkey here to discuss the engagement of stateless groups, specifically religious and ethnic minority groups, in international relations. And we will just give you highlights of their distinguished bios. 

Dr. Laura van Waas is an assistant professor at the Department of European and International Law at Tilburg Law School in the Netherlands, as well as cofounder and codirector of the Institute of Statelessness and Inclusion. Dr. von Waas’ Ph.D. manuscript, Nationality Matters, is widely used as a reference for understanding international statelessness law by researchers and practitioners all over the world. She’s carried out extensive research studies and teaching projects for the UN Refugee Agency, the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Women’s Refugee Commission, the U.S. Department of State, the European Parliament, and many more.  

Dr Henri Barkey is an adjunct senior fellow for Middle East Studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations, as well as the Bernard L. and Bertha F. Cohen chair in international relations at Lehigh University. Here at CFR he works on the strategic future of the Kurds in the Middle East, and writes extensively on Turkey, the Kurds, and other Middle East issues. He previously served as a nonresident senior associate at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, and on the State Department Policy Planning Staff, where he focused on issues related to the Eastern Mediterranean, the Middle East, and U.S. intelligence. 

So both—welcome, both of you, to today’s conversation. Thank you very much for spending the time with us. Laura, I would love to start with you to give us a definition of statelessness and give us some context, before we get to more specifics.  

VAN WAAS: Of course. Thank you. And I’m really pleased to be here with you today.  

So statelessness—it’s quite a mouthful. Under international law, it refers to someone who is not recognized as a citizen or a national of any state. And it’s a global phenomenon. It affects people all around the world, here in the Netherlands, where I’m speaking to you from, also in the United States. And it arises from a number of different causes. At its basic kind of level of the system of nationality, each country sets its own nationality rules. And that means that things can sometimes go wrong and people can become excluded. In some cases it’s a kind of a conflict of nationality laws in how they operate that someone is born in one place to parents from another place and they don’t meet any of the criteria to access nationality. But much more often, statelessness is actually a cause of discrimination.  

So discrimination against religious and ethnic minorities is the most significant cause of statelessness globally. The UN estimates that 75 percent of those who are living without nationality today belong to minority groups. But also, discrimination against women can cause statelessness. There are twenty-four countries where women don’t have the right to pass nationality to their children on equal terms with men. That can, again, put children at risk of statelessness. And it also tends to be an intergenerational problem. So for many countries—the United States is a little bit of an exception—in many countries around the world you acquire a nationality through your parents. And if you have stateless parents, you are also born without a nationality. So it’s a problem that is self-perpetuating. And globally it’s understood that the problem is growing over time. So more children are being born stateless than individual statelessness cases are being resolved.  

And perhaps kind of to wrap up this broad strokes introduction, if we think about the connection with religious and ethnic minorities, then in particular the mind goes to a number of communities that are affected by statelessness and have been for a considerable time. So groups such as the Rohingya minority community in Myanmar, that also faces severe persecution and acts of genocide. Groups such as the Kurds in particular in Syria, that I think we’ll also hear more about later on. There are also communities targeted in Assam in India, where a large number of people were deprived of their nationality status in 2019. Dominicans of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, stripped of their citizenship in 2013. And there are examples from Kenya, from Kuwait, from Europe. So it’s definitely an issue that sits very much at the intersection of human rights and discrimination against minorities. I hope that gives a kind of—the kind of context that you’re looking for.  

FASKIANOS: Absolutely. 

Henri, do you want to give your perspective?  

BARKEY: Sure. Thank you for inviting me. I’m delighted to be here.  

Look, Laura essentially defined what statelessness is. What I will do is I’ll talk about the Kurds, who are essentially the largest minority today probably in the world without a state. And they are kind of unlucky because they are divided among four countries—Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. And when you look at the numbers, in fact, it’s actually quite significant. I mean, there are sixty million Kurds, people estimate, in Turkey, seven million in Iraq, ten million in Iran, and maybe three million in Syria. Now, we don’t know what those numbers are because they’re not recognized as such. They’re not recognized as being Kurds. There’s no piece of paper that says, you know, you’re a Kurd—except for Iraq, what I’ll talk about maybe in the second part.  

But the interesting thing about the Kurds is that they are a distinct minority, in the sense that they have their own traditions, their own language. They’ve been around for thousands of years. So it’s not as if they just emerge out of nowhere. But politics, or geopolitics, essentially has determined their fate. That is to say, whether you are in Iran, in Iraq—sorry—Iran, Syria, or Turkey—let’s put Iraq aside for a moment—you are not even recognized as being a Kurd. There is no such thing as a Kurd. You don’t exist, essentially. But it does not mean that you are not a citizen of the country in which you live.  

Let’s say you were—you’re a Kurd who’s born in a town in Turkey. You will get a Turkish nationality. You’ll get a name. You’ll get identity papers, et cetera. But you will not be recognized as a Kurd. Moreover, the more important thing here, is the cultural aspect. So if you are born into a Kurdish family you’ll be speaking Kurdish at home, whether you live in Iran or Iraq or Syria or Iran—or Turkey, right? So that’s the language you grew up with. But that language will not be taught in any school in any of those countries, because it doesn’t exist, right? So, yes, by Laura’s definition these people do have a state. They belong to Turkey, or Iran, or so on. But in fact, as people, they really are stateless because they don’t own their own state, they own they don’t own their own culture, they don’t own their own traditions.  

They can’t decide, for instance, to take a certain day off because that’s a holiday, because that’s not the law of the land. So, yes, they are citizens of a place, but they suffer amazing discrimination. I mean, depending on the period—I mean, there was—there were periods in Turkey where, in the ’30s, ’40s, where, if you had, let’s say, two persons in the street speaking Kurdish and there was a policeman who heard them, right, he could fine them because they spoke Kurdish in the streets. Not if they spoke French or, think of another language. That would be OK. But if you spoke Kurdish. I mean, so they went—these countries, in many ways, went overboard in terms of denying those people’s very fundamental rights. 

Today, for instance, I mean, you can’t teach Kurdish in all these countries. And imagine, I mean, language, as it goes from one generation to another, isn’t—I mean, language is the source of your literature. Language is the source of your culture. And in order to be able to expand it, to enrich it, you should be able to teach it. You can’t. And, in a way, to me—we can talk about it—about this later also—to me, this is the greatest challenge that’s facing the Kurds today, is the issue of language. In some ways, more important whether or not they’re independent—have independence or not. Because that is a—that is fundamental to their existence.  

You can live as a Kurd. You can remain as a Kurd. Somebody who moves to the United States—the Kurd who moves the United States, you know, will remain a Kurd. But he doesn’t have to have an independent state to call himself or herself a Kurd. However, but if you—if you lose your language, then you lose your identity, right? So this is—to me, this is going to emerge as probably the single most fundamental challenge that the Kurds will face.  

Now, I just want to say something about Iraq. So sometimes you can be not very—I mean, the Kurds, clearly, are not very fortunate people. But the Iraqi Kurds are a little bit more fortunate than the others. What happened was that when Saddam Hussein was a dictator of Iraq, and he—the Iraqi regime would repress and massacre Kurds on a routine basis. But because he invaded—he invaded Kuwait in 1990, and United States and its allies eventually went to war against Saddam. So Saddam’s actions attracted a great deal of international attention. And as a result, because he had also gone after—he pushed the Kurds in northern Iraq all the way to the Turkish border, creating massive refugee problem, the United States and its allies created a no-fly zone in northern Iraq to allow the Kurds to come back into that region.  

And eventually, that emerged—especially after 2003 Iraq War—into a federal Iraq composed of an Arab Iraq and a Kurdish Iraq. So the Kurds in northern Iraq, there’s something called the Kurdistan Regional Government. So they are—that’s the only place where they have legal existence, so to say, they are recognized as Kurds. The language they speak in their own government, in the federal government, is Kurdish. The language in the schools is Kurdish. But that’s for northern Iraq only. There’s many more things to say, but I’ll stop here.  

FASKIANOS: Thank you. 

Laura, just going back to you, in your book, Nationality Matters, you researched a role that international law can play in preventing statelessness and protecting the right to nationality. Can you talk about how effective international law has been in implementing existing statelessness conventions and in promoting new frameworks?  

VAN WAAS: Sure. Yeah. So if you look at the international legal system, then statelessness has been dealt with as a distinct issue, in particular after the Second World War. Even before the major human rights conventions were adopted two specific instruments dedicated to statelessness came into being. So in 1954, a convention was adopted to protect the rights of stateless people. It’s a sister convention to the much more widely known 1951 refugee convention, and it essentially does the same thing. It recognizes that to be stateless is an international legal status and it obliges states to protect certain rights for people who meet that definition.  

And then a number of years later, in 1961 a second convention was adopted, the UN Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness. And that’s an instrument that tries to actually ensure that everyone has a nationality, basically. But, unfortunately, after these instruments were adopted not very much happened for several decades. And there was not a lot of interest in the issue more broadly, and very few states actually acceded to the conventions.  

But what happened in this intervening period is obviously the flourishing of human rights law. And as I discuss when I explain the context in which statelessness arises, it’s actually quite a crosscutting issue. So it goes to questions of gender inequality, children’s rights, minority rights, discrimination. And these are all areas that came to be protected under human rights law. So today, if you look at the international legal instruments that can address statelessness, human rights law actually provides a really strong foundation for that. And the right to nationality is recognized in different ways across almost all of the major UN human rights treaties, as well as in a number of important regional instruments.  

What has happened over the last twenty years in particular, since the turn of the millennium, is that people have started to use these, including through strategic litigation, to really assert that the right to a nationality is a right that you can claim, vis-à-vis a state. And there have been a number of very successful cases where states have been found to violate the right to nationality and the principle of nondiscrimination, for example, or the principle of best interests of the child, in the context of nationality.  

So today, there’s sort of a renewed interest in statelessness. And in fact, what you see now is that states are increasingly signing up to these relatively old conventions from 1954 and 1961. So there’s definitely a growing number of state parties. But there’s also increased use of the human rights frameworks, which you see through the Human Rights Council resolutions, the Universal Periodic Review, increased work of the UN treaty bodies and special rapporteurs. So now there is much more interest and active use of the broader international frameworks.  

However, the situation on the ground is not changing as quickly, obviously, as that interest really dictates. And what you see, in fact, around the world at the moment is that rising authoritarianism and xenophobia is creating new risks of statelessness. And we have had a number of cases of large scale deprivation of nationality over the last fifteen, twenty years. So the problem on the ground is not necessarily being resolved at the same pace that the interest is growing, but you definitely see increased engagement and really strong recognition of statelessness as a human rights issue, and no longer as a sort of a technical legal anomaly that’s a very niche issue and the purview of lawyers only. And I think that that is really changing not just the narratives but also the understanding of what duty states hold when it comes to the right to nationality. So I live in a time of hope, but with an enormous amount of work still to be done.  

FASKIANOS: Thank you. 

I’ll throw one last question to you, Henri, and then we’ll go to the group for their questions and comments. So please think about what you want to ask. We want to invite you to join the conversation.  

But in light of what—you did talk about how has the Kurdish identity and the Kurdish diaspora’s connection to its homeland been shaped, in spite of the lack of a recognized Kurdish state? And are there lessons to be learned? 

BARKEY: Lessons to be learned, for who? 

FASKIANOS: That could inform international policy for other groups. 

BARKEY: I don’t—I mean, to be honest, I don’t know, because the Kurds are relatively unique, given the situation. And you—I will get to that in a minute. But I wanted to make a point to kind of talk about what Laura was saying, and give you a concrete example, with respect to the Kurds. Now, I did say that the Kurds essentially are the citizens of the countries in which they live, but they’re not recognized as such. They don’t have that identity. There is actually one little exception to the question of statelessness. I mean, statelessness, as Laura essentially talked about, is a legal construct, right? And I was talking about a political construct. But there’s a one—there’s one case in Syria.  

In 1962, the dictator of Syria, the father of the current dictator, Hafez al-Assad decided to, overnight, like that, take away the rights—citizenship rights of 120,000 Kurds. Now, 120,000 Kurds in those days was actually quite a large number. Today, as I said, there are three million Kurds. Maybe Syria’s population is about ten million. But anyway, in 1962, in the—in a heavily Kurdish region called Hasakah, he just took away their rights.  

Post-Webinar Correction: In 1962, Hafez al-Assad was not president of Syria; he was a member of the military and planned coups in the following years before successfully coming to power. Nazim al-Qudsi was president of Syria at this time. 

Now, what does that mean? I mean, this is 1962, so we’re not talking about a globalized world. We’re not talking about the ability of people to move easily. 

So if you are—imagine for a moment you’re a family of five. Just pick a number. From one day to another, your rights as a citizen is taken away. What does it mean? That means you can’t go to school. That means you can’t avail yourself of health services, government services. And country like Syria, especially in those days, was very central. Today it’s too very centralized. I mean, the state is very, very important, right? Social Security or any type of retirement, right? Any right that the state gives a citizen, overnight, with no reason whatsoever, will be taken away from you.  

Why did Assad do this? Because he wanted to be able to manipulate population numbers and change the demographics of that heavily Kurdish area, and essentially reduce the power of the Kurds. Now, you have to understand that in all four countries the Kurds have been seen with a great deal of hostility, because, you know, those—the leadership in all those countries have always feared that the Kurds will rebel. And yes, they have rebelled. In every country, the Kurds have rebelled. I mean, they have not accepted the conditions that they found themselves in.  

And in fact, today in three of the countries there’s an active Kurdish rebellion. And in Iraq is the only place where you don’t have any, because you have a federal state. But in 1962—so these 120,000 Kurds—and the numbers, of course, the descendants—when you think about the descendants, et cetera, is much, much larger. We don’t really know how many there are. And so Assad’s son, Bashar, after the Syrian uprising started in 2011, he tried to maybe improve conditions. So to say, he did make some overtures. But in reality, they were really a sham and those people never really got, in significant numbers, back their rights.  

So to this day, technically they live in Syria, they’re not the citizens of Syria. They’re not the citizens of any other country for that matter. And they have to live. But that’s a—that’s what Laura was talking about. I mean, a legal decision to take away somebody’s position. So I was talking in general, with respect to the Kurds, about the lack of having political rights—whether it’s language, being able to teach, to do what you want, essentially. But you asked me about the lessons. Let me just say a couple of things on that.  

One of the lessons, ironically, is that with international intervention things can change. So after 2003, after the second Iraq War, we ended up with an Iraq that was—and Saddam was overthrown. We ended up with federal Iraq. The boundaries of Iraq were not changed, but its structure was changed so that the Kurds now had certain rights. Now, that event, in and of itself, if there’s a lesson to be learned, is that the Turks, the Iranians, and the Syrians are petrified that we’re going to do this again—we, the international community.  

So the Turks have—even though the Syrian Kurds are America’s allies in the fight against the Islamic State in northern Syria, the Turks continuously attack them because they perceive that we are going to create another Kurdistan Regional Government, like we did in Iraq. That there will be another federal—Syria is a mess now. The Iranians fear the same thing. And that if you—if you create a second Iraqi-style Kurdish government, that who’s going to be next? Iran? Turkey? So, I mean, the lessons that are being learned sometimes are not necessarily positive lessons, but negative lessons. 

FASKIANOS: Understood. All right, so thank you both for that. 

I want to go now to all of you for your questions. 

(Gives queuing instructions.) 

So the first written question we have is from LeAnn Flesher, vice president of academics and professor of biblical interpretation of Berkeley School of Theology: How does statelessness impact the Palestinians? Laura, do you want to? 

VAN WAAS: Yeah, I can start us off on that. So the statelessness of Palestinians is a slightly more complex legal question than for other groups, such as the Kurds in Syria who, as was described, were stripped of the citizenship of the country that continues to exist. So there is a Syria. You can be a Syrian citizen, but this group of people is no longer considered that. In the question of Palestine, it’s the statelessness or citizenship of Palestinians is obviously closely associated with the question of Palestinian statehood, which remains a contested issue within international relations more broadly. 

What is clear is that there is—there is no citizenship law of Palestine. And so even for those countries that would recognize Palestine as a state, it remains a challenge, actually, to ascertain the legal status of Palestinians. Because it’s not entirely clear who would be considered as a citizen by the State of Palestine. That’s more evident for those who remain in the occupied Palestinian territories. But for those who have been displaced over successive generations by conflict, it’s not clear who would be included under the citizenship legislation, or future citizenship legislation of Palestine. 

What you also see in the region is that countries that have provided—have been host countries for refugees from Palestine have generally accorded them rights without providing access to citizenship in that state. So even though you may have several generations of Palestinians living in Lebanon, for example, it doesn’t mean that they have been able to access Lebanese nationality. In fact, there is a general accord among Arab states that there shouldn’t be access to nationality in the host country because it’s a way of confirming that, in fact, the Palestinian state is the state of nationality of that population, and where people should be able to return to.  

So it’s a little bit more complex. And what you find in practice is that in countries where Palestinians become displaced as refugees, which we saw quite considerably when the conflict in Syria also forced Palestinians who had previously lived in Syria to become newly displaced, for example, to Europe, then other countries are grappling with this question as to whether to recognize Palestinians as stateless or to consider them nationals of Palestine, in the acknowledgement that citizenship of Palestine doesn’t function in quite the same way as it would for other states. Also, because Palestine doesn’t have control fully over its territory and the admission of nationals of Palestine back into that territory.  

So I’m sorry if that’s a convoluted answer, but it’s less straightforward, I suppose, in legal terms than it would be to say whether Rohingya are stateless or not, because they are clearly excluded under the citizenship law of Myanmar, which is their country. Which makes it a slightly more complex question to answer. (Laughs.) But it certainly speaks to their treatment internationally. 

BARKEY: Can I just add something to that? I mean, there’s also— 

FASKIANOS: Absolutely. 

BARKEY: —a difference between them and the Kurds, in the sense that nobody denies that the Palestinians exist, right? I mean, including the Israelis. I mean, there are Palestinians who live in Israel who are Israeli citizens, back from 1948. So they have Israeli citizenship. But nobody is—you know, we talk about the Palestinians, but we don’t necessarily deny their existence. Whereas for the Iranians, the Turks, the notion of Kurds is—they deny very much the existence of Kurds. I mean, nobody denies the fact that Palestinians speak Arabic, right? Or may have different religions. If you deny the rights of the Kurds to speak Kurdish, it’s a different—ironically—it’s a different ballgame, right? So, you have the Iranians and, let’s say, the Turks and the Syrians who support the Palestinians, but when it comes to their own Kurds they apply a completely different standard. 

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I know that LeAnn had her hand raised. Do you want to just comment, and then I’ll go to the next question? I didn’t see you had raised your hand before I read your question. 

Q: Oh, I’m sorry, I raised my hand because you were saying that we had to raise our hands, and I’d already written my question. But thank you. That was very, very helpful. I will be teaching a class in the fall that deals with the conflict in Israel-Palestine right now, and that was one of my key questions. You know, how to think about them in terms of statehood, and so on. So I appreciate your responses. 

FASKIANOS: Fantastic. I’m going to go to the next raised hand, Shaker Elsayed. 

Q: Thank you very much. 

The question I have is actually much more a remark for policymakers to consider, and for the Council on Foreign Policy to see if this is something that the United States can help with, to advocate it as a policy. Which is, any state who does something like what Syria did—canceling the citizenship immediately of hundreds or tens of thousands of people all at once—they should be recognized as a pariah state. And their recognition by the United Nation has to be in question. And any aid to this kind of government—because if we leave the influx of statelessness continue, we will end up in a century or less that states will mean nothing.  

So we need to, kind of, like, stem this in the bud. Because this phenomenon makes people lose their sense of security, their sense of presence, their sense of belonging. And those are central for the human—social, economic, and political—interaction and rights. So this is much more than the right to be educated or the right to speak your language. This is about your existence. So I wonder if that policy is something that could help, if every state knows that I cannot cancel my own citizens’ right to citizenship, that’s my issue. Thank you. 

FASKIANOS: Laura. 

VAN WAAS: I’m happy to respond. I mean, it’s hard to disagree with the sentiments of that. I do think that often violations of the right to a nationality are not given the urgency that they demand. I think, in part, because nationality has traditionally been understood to be part of the sort of exercise of state sovereignty, and it’s the legitimate right of each state to decide who is in and who is out. And that means that when that power, which in itself is uncontested, is used abusively, it is more challenging, I think, in some cases, for states to really step up and say that a line has been crossed.  

And one of the things that I think states that are using citizenship instrumentally to basically engineer the demographics of the state, one of the ways in which that is sometimes sort of hidden more from view is to pretend that it’s a sort of an administrative exercise to recalibrate who is a citizen and whether people have the right documents. I believe that that’s what happened actually in Syria, also, in 1962, that there was a sort of a census exercise that was purportedly an administrative exercise whereby people had to provide certain documents, and then their name would simply be reinscribed.  

And that that sounds much less harmful, in some ways. It’s a bureaucratic thing. Surely, that’s fine. And that’s what you’ve seen. For example, I mentioned in India in the state of Assam there was an exercise to reverify who is a citizen of India. But by the time the state had finished checking everyone’s documents and demanding proof that people had been in the country since before 1971, 1.9 million people were left off the new National Registry of Citizens. And while there was, you know, international outcry from civil society groups, and considerable public attention given to this, I don’t see that leading to the kind of measures that you’ve described against the state of India.  

And in fact, there is much talk about rolling out that exercise that was limited to the region of Assan to the rest of the country. And so I do feel that for a number of different reasons, and in some cases there’s wider geopolitical issues at stake, but the right to a nationality is politically fraught. And not as easy, I think, for states to maybe intervene on, as on other issues such as education which are much less, perhaps, politically hot potatoes. But I agree that much more can and should be done. And it’s really important to recognize what is actually happening and not to be sort of bamboozled by bureaucratic processes or, you know, have these kinds of things covered up in that way. 

FASKIANOS: Henri, do you want to add anything should I go to the next question? All right. 

We will go to Azza Karam, please.  

Q: Thank you so very much. Extremely enlightening.  

I have a question for both of the speakers. And it may seem a little bit all over the place, but it actually has to do with—I appreciated the highlighting of the of the matter and the issue of statelessness, per se. And I noted the hope that Ms. van Waas was mentioning, in terms of we now have this as a very clear issue with clear guidance, and so on and so forth. But what I’m curious about is that the number of stateless people in general is perhaps larger than it’s ever been in our common history, recorded history. And we do know that states, such as they are, as you have all pointed out very well, are struggling anyway with their own stateless minorities.  

So my question is, where do we see the challenges posed by the increasing number of stateless people—where do we see these challenges being dealt with and coped with by states? Which are, themselves, struggling to serve those that they acknowledge are their own citizens, whether rightly or wrongly? How are we to deal as an international community, with these massive numbers of stateless people, the challenges posed by them? Where do they get succor? From institutions which are primarily, like the United Nations, state-centric, and which are struggling to cope with the gazillion and one other challenges they have?  

Where do you see the hope for these communities? How can we safeguard some of their interests? Which, given that you’ve each pointed out quite rightly, that they are so incredibly diverse. Each has a very different reality and record, and so on. Where do we deal? How does the international community deal with statelessness, in its multitudes, today? What are your thoughts on that? Thank you so much. 

BARKEY: Laura, why don’t you go ahead on this?  

VAN WAAS: OK, sure. It’s a wonderfully large question. So I have to be an optimist. My work requires that of me, because if I lose hope that something can change then all of the people who I work with, who are actually directly impacted by statelessness around the world, cannot lean on that optimism and hope, and continue with their work. So by default, I have to kind of see that there are opportunities. But I think—I mean, I also do genuinely believe that the successful issue emergence that there has been over the past decade in particular, when it has really sped up, that it matters in probably a myriad small ways.  

And so while I agree that the problems are larger than they have ever been, and the COVID pandemic also really shone a spotlight on just how acutely at risk you are when things are even under more pressure if you are not a citizen of any country and you’re not being factored into emergency relief and health care, et cetera. So, yes, the problems are enormous. But I—through my day-to-day work with stateless communities around the world and individual activists—I know of many examples of small but very important successes.  

So, for instance, in the United States a community group organized themselves as United Stateless, formed an NGO, and is taking on advocacy in Congress to pass legislation, and has had a number of successes already with the administration in terms of having statelessness recognized as a status under U.S. at least administrative procedures. And so that will make an enormous difference, for example, in terms of detention or other issues like that in the United States. There are countries that have reformed their laws to allow women to pass nationality to their children, which makes, again, a very wide difference system-wide for those countries and prevents a risk of statelessness.  

And so my hope is derived from many, many, many, smaller successes. And what I also see is that while it is increasingly frustrating to see how obstructed processes are within the UN system, for many issues including for statelessness, what you see emerging in—maybe also in response to that—is ever greater mobilization by communities that are directly impacted to take their own advocacy forward and to also push for local solutions, to work directly with civil registries in their own localities to resolve problems in the day-to-day. So I see not just an issue emerging in terms of international recognition, but also this emerging bottom-up local activism that is driving change in many ways, even if we’re going to have to wait longer for that bigger systems change. And I’m very happy to also share more examples of that type of work for anyone who’s interested in what community groups are doing. 

BARKEY: Let me—I look at it differently, because I don’t do what Laura does. But the truth is, the problem, in my view, that’s expanding—which of statelessness is one aspect of—is a lack of rights, generally around the world. I mean, now many countries are becoming—there seems to be a return to authoritarianism in many countries, whether it is populist authoritarian leaders, or it is state dictators. Increasingly a minority—I’m sorry—and minorities, whether ethnic, religious, however you want to define a minority, end up being on the receiving end. And it doesn’t really matter whether you’re a member of the state or—you’re stateless or you’re not stateless, I mean, but that’s the problem that’s expanding. 

Yes, we saw, maybe—the other day in Bangladesh you saw the long-term authoritarian leader being kicked out, which was great. But let’s see if it’s going to be replaced with something better. But the increasing polarization—geopolitical polarization of the world between the West and Russia and China on the other hand, also is not a good sign because now you find that countries like China and Russia are really pushing for—supporting, essentially, very, very authoritarian regimes. I mean, you see that in the fight over what happened in Venezuela the last—ten days ago, in the elections. I mean, both the Chinese and the Russians are supporting the incumbent, who clearly lost the elections. But so—but these are—what I’m talking—I’m just basically talking about an atmosphere of increased authoritarianism in the world, and of which statelessness is one aspect. 

FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Shaik Ubaid, who has a raised hand and also wrote the question in the chat. So over to you. 

Q: Hi. Thank you so much for the opportunity.  

My question was, if we really—if the international community really wants to be effective, then there should be a single standard. For example, Rohingyas have been suffering genocide and ethnic cleansing from the 1960s, even though the citizenship was taken away in the 1980s. But we do not see any assertiveness by the international community. You know, the most recent being around, you know, 2014, when we saw mass rapes, and ethnic cleansing, another wave there. So few the Rohingyas are left in Burma compared to outside. And similarly, as it was mentioned, India’s drive in northeastern India and now the whole of India is not getting so much scrutiny, we see that in Kashmir. So, whereas for the Zionist Jews and for Iraqi Kurds, there was international intervention.  

So unless, you know, there are policies by the NGOs to put pressure on their governments, this will not—and I would like to make, I think, two corrections. In 1962, Assad was not yet in power in Syria. So I do not think that he was involved in taking away the citizenship of the Kurds, even though he was a very, you know, tyrannical dictator. And, secondly, Israel rejected the existence of Palestinians till recently. Golda Meir and even later other leaders kept saying that there is no such thing as Palestinians. Solely under international pressure they now admit that there is a Palestinian entity. So we have to continue to exert pressure from outside in all these parts.  

FASKIANOS: Henri, do you want to start or Laura?  

BARKEY: Look, I mean, one can add a whole group—many different groups. In recent times, we’ve seen the genocide of the Yazidis under the Islamic State. Look, the international community is not that powerful, in the sense that you can try to intervene, and sometimes you’re successful. It depends. But they often—even if you try and do something, what happens is the government doesn’t listen to you. And are you going—let’s say, what are you going to do? Go to war? I mean, if that’s the only way to stop something, and every time there’s a massacre somewhere? I understand where Dr. Ubaid is coming from, but the question is—I’m not saying that we shouldn’t do anything. I’m not saying—but we should not expect that things are going to change simply because we wish—we wish it to change. Unfortunately, that’s not—that’s not the case.  

And, look, just let me go—to go back to Turkey for a moment. Turkey’s a member of NATO. Turkey is one of United States and the Western world’s most important ally. And yet, if you want to just—I’m going to give you an example of what happened last week. There are thousands and thousands of Kurds who are prisoners, political prisoners in Turkey. When you visit a relative in prison, you used to be able to speak Kurdish, more often than not. Let’s say you have a son who’s in jail. The mother may not speak Turkish. She may not know Turkish. So she would—she would be—was allowed to speak Kurdish in prison with her son, during visiting times. The other day, they took away that right, so you can’t. So a mother cannot talk to her son.  

So, but this is our ally. What are we going to do? You think that the secretary of state is going to call the Turkish president and say, do something about it? No. I mean, this is not—there are a million issues like that on a daily basis, and you’re expecting also a small number of countries who are—which are willing to—or care about these issues. You think the Russians and the Chinese care about this stuff? Have you ever seen them say anything like this on anywhere? No. So, I mean, maybe I’m being despondent a little bit, but I’m sorry, but this is—you know, we should try harder, yes. But let’s not expect that things that are going to change overnight. 

FASKIANOS: Laura, do you want to add, or shall I go to the next question?  

VAN WAAS: I mean, it’s hard to add to that. I suppose the one thing I would just say, in terms of the Rohingya population specifically, it’s deeply distressing what is happening in Rakhine state, again as we sit here at the moment. And one of—one of the not-helpful lessons for the Rohingya population now, which, you know, it’s very despairing to think of how dire the situation is and how the international community has so far failed to do more to prevent the genocide. But what we can see is how successful the long-term campaign of othering and vilification of that community has been over decades and decades before the citizenship law actually stripped them of their citizenship and subsequently, to the point where this community has been persecuted and chased out of the country so successfully that it actually also becomes very difficult for the community themselves to organize in response and to call for accountability internationally. 

And so it’s, sadly, an example of just how statelessness can become part and parcel of this really extreme form of othering, and such an effective means of taking away rights, and voice, and identity. And now, over 75-80 percent of the Rohingya population no longer lives in Myanmar. And there’s questions as to whether they would ever be able to return. And so it’s an example, again, of understanding that the right to nationality is not just a right that stands on its own, but it has such deep impact for individuals but also for communities and their identity and ability to exist. 

FASKIANOS: Fantastic. 

I’m going to take a written question from Mark Edington with the Convocation of Episcopal Churches in Europe: We’re speaking here about the policies of states toward the issue of statelessness. What role do you see for religious communities in raising awareness, advocating, and providing support for stateless communities? 

VAN WAAS: Maybe I can give a short initial answer to that. So at the moment there is a very exciting new international initiative. We will have to wait and see what the impact of that is. But basically, to date UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, has been the lead agency for addressing statelessness, and has spearheaded previous efforts. But what is happening at the moment is actually the establishment of a global alliance to address statelessness, which involves a number of different UN agencies as well as international organizations, regional organizations, civil society groups, and stateless-led groups. And there is absolutely space within that also for religious organizations and leaders to become part of efforts to further raise awareness of the issue and also to support advocacy for areas of policy change.  

One of the specific thematic issues that the global alliance will work on is around the child’s right to a nationality, for example. And there, there is a role for religious institutions not just to promote this right and the importance of the right to nationality for every child, but to even get involved at the level of assisting with birth registration processes and awareness raising for individuals. So there is great scope for involvement. There are a number of existing things that have happened over the last few years that are good examples. And this is really the time to push for greater involvement. The global alliance will launch on the 14th of October in Geneva. And it will then become, you know, possible to become more involved in those efforts going forward, and to help shape the agenda. 

FASKIANOS: Great. 

I’m going to take the next question from Sayed Sayeed, who’s a religious life advisor at Columbia University. If you can unmute yourself. There you go.  

Q: OK. Thank you for giving me a chance to ask a question.  

OK, I’m wondering if there is any movement or initiative, or thinkers, politicians, whatever you want to name, who are raising their voice for a globalized society. You know, I mean we have, for example, the World Health Organization, you know, and things like that. Is there a voice or, you know, a thought or idea to say that the best way to live in the present times is to have a single universal order of living? People should be free to go wherever they want to, should be free to live wherever they want to. Of course, there might be some administrative issues. There might be some other kinds of reasons to say, you know, we have to regulate this. regulate that. I mean, there should be room for that. But we should have a global citizenship. Is there a possibility like that? Is there thinking like that? Is there someone who is advocating this kind of concept? Thank you. 

VAN WAAS: Citizenship is so deeply entrenched with how the world system is organized, and the separation into nation states, that it’s hard to imagine the possibility of world citizenship without that entire system being reimagined in some way. So that would mean thinking differently about how you organize taxation, and borders, and how do you—what do you do about identity. And it so there have certainly been voices at various moments for world citizenship. And in fact, shortly after the Second World War, there was a sort of a world citizens movement that was starting to issue its own passports. And so it’s not an unknown thought or idea. 

But if you look at the world today, you see much more raising of walls and cementing of borders than the opposite. So I think that we’re moving far more in the opposite direction, unfortunately. Where, you know, states are really putting their own citizens first and testing again who’s on the inside of that. So I don’t feel a lot of hope that that type of initiative would get a lot of traction, given the way of the world at the moment. 

BARKEY: No, I agree. And also, I mean, just think about administratively, how would you run something like that? Would you have one government? We can see already that most countries are having trouble with the governments that they have because those governments are not efficient, or don’t do a very good job. The tasks are becoming amazingly complicated. I mean, just think of how difficult it is to run a country these days. And so you’re going to do it on a global scale? I mean, unfortunately, that’s not—I don’t think it’s realistic.  

But the other thing I would say, ironically, I don’t think it’s desirable. I think having variety around the world—I mean, if you—let’s say, if you—suddenly, you took everybody around the world and made a big soup out of it, then everybody will be the same, right? Cultures would mesh. I mean, it’s nice to have different cultures, different languages, different traditions, different histories, different identities. I mean, I think there’s something—diversity is a desirable attribute, I would think. I don’t want—I don’t want everybody in my neighborhood to be exactly like me. That will be very boring, right? So I think diversity is a good thing. I think we should be having boundaries and—for both administrative reasons and for variety reasons should remain. I guess I’m not a big optimist person, but. 

FASKIANOS: (Laughs.) Well, then this pairing was perfect. We have optimistic and less optimistic. (Laughs.) We are at the end of our time. I’m sorry we could not get to all the questions. But thank you both very much for this really very rich conversation on a very important issue. Thank you for all the work that you’re doing on it, and for your optimism. We appreciate it. We will be sending out, as I said at the beginning, the video and transcript to this conversation, posting it as well.  

We encourage you to follow their work on X at @LauraVanWaas and at @HBarkey. And we also encourage you to follow CFR’s Religion and Foreign Policy Program at @CFR_Religion. You can send us any feedback or suggestions for future topics and speakers at [email protected]. We appreciate your joining us on this August day. We hope you enjoy what’s the last week of August before we get to Labor Day, and are off and running back to our regular tempo of programming.  

So, again, thank you to Laura van Waas and Henri Barkey for your expertise and your time today. We appreciate it.  

BARKEY: Thank you.  

VAN WAAS: Thank you. 

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