"The vulnerability of stateless persons to all sorts of human rights violations made me want to somehow help make their situation a little bit better. What I find so heart-breaking about statelessness is precisely the impact this phenomenon has on the individual’s identity: being told you do not belong in the place you identify with can be devastating, as it can make one question who one really is."
In this series of blog posts, we are asking the students honoured in this year's UNHCR Award for Statelessness Research about their experiences studying the phenomenon on statelessness and their research findings. Third in the series is Ms. Maria Jose Recalde Vela whose thesis How can identity assert a claim to citizenship? In search of a safeguard against statelessness from a legal and socio-psychological perspective. submitted in completion of the Liberal Arts Programme at Tilburg University (the Netherlands), was chosen by the Jury as the Best Research in the Graduate Category.
Could you summarise, in 2 or 3 sentences, what your
research was about?
My research was about exploring how a person’s identity develops in
relation to the place and groups a person is influenced by (such as the place
one grows up in and the society one grows up around) and whether this identity
can somehow be used as a safeguard against statelessness.
What first got you interested in the problem of
statelessness?
I first became interested in the problem of statelessness after taking the
course at Tilburg University taught by Dr. van Waas during my second year of
Liberal Arts and Sciences. I had never heard of stateless before; until I took
the course I never even though there were people in this planet without a
nationality! Nationality is something that we take for granted, so it is very
shocking to find out that there’s around 10 million people without a
nationality. What got me so interested in the issue is that the impact
statelessness has on the individual is very deep. Stateless persons are not
only deprived of basic civil and political rights such as voting for example,
but are also affected at an individual and personal level. I am not sure if
research has been done on this, but I am sure that statelessness has a massive
impact in the individual’s mental and emotional well-being. The vulnerability
of stateless persons to all sorts of human rights violations made me want to
somehow help make their situation a little bit better. What I find so
heart-breaking about statelessness is precisely the impact this phenomenon has
on the individual’s identity: being told you do not belong in the place you
identify with can be devastating, as it can make one question who one really
is.
Why did you choose this particular research topic?
I always took nationality for granted, but at the same time, I was always
confused by it. What was always strange is that I always felt like I am not
from one single place, but from every place I have lived in. in my short years,
I have lived in a few countries (so far, 4), and every time I moved to a new place
I developed an attachment to that place, and I developed a feeling of belonging
to that place, even if in paper it was not that way and in paper I have one
nationality. I started thinking about this and while I was reading Dr. van
Waas’ book I came across a section which describes what the “genuine link” is.
The genuine link is the social fact of attachment of an individual with a
state, and the genuine link is the basis for nationality. The ICJ described
nationality as “a legal bond having as its basis a social fact of attachment, a genuine
connection of existence.” So in other words, nationality is a legal reflection of this social fact of
attachment between individual and state. But state not as in government; state
as in, country, homeland, nation-state, etc. A place, a society. Then I started thinking how we
develop these social facts of attachment with the places we live in and how
this attachment shapes our identities. I felt like my identity has been heavily
shaped by every country I have lived in, and this influence the places have had
on my identity have contributed to my attachment to these places. I am attached
to a place, I feel like I belong there, I have a social fact of attachment to
this place. And what is nationality? A reflection of this social fact of
attachment. If a person like me has become attached to a place and feels like
she belongs there only from having lived a few years there, there is no way any
state can tell me that a person who has lived his/her entire life in the same
country, many times in the same area, has no social fact of attachment to that
country and does not belong there. Many, if not most, stateless persons live
their entire lives in the same place for a great number of reasons. However,
the challenge for this was that it is not easy to prove a social fact of
attachment; it is not something tangible, like a birth certificate for example.
A social fact of attachment can mean anything! I thought maybe identity can
help solve this problem. However, identity can also be anything! Therefore, I
chose to focus on 3 socio-psychological theories that helped me to explain how
a person’s identity develops in relation to the place and the society a person
grows up in. while doing research, I came across an interesting principle that
was proposed by Manley O Hudson: jus connectionis. I had only heard about the
jus soli (law of the soil), jus sanguinis (law of blood) and jus domicili (law
of residence) for nationality attribution. Jus connectionis? Never heard of it.
But it caught my attention. Jus connectionis takes into consideration a
person’s connections and identity for determining nationality. Jus
connectionis, however, does not have the same status as jus sanguinis, jus soli
and jus domicili; it is a theory, a thought, a proposal, an idea. But I thought
it was definitely worth looking into, particularly since it could contribute to
my search for a safeguard against statelessness.
Could you briefly describe how you went about your
research? E.g. did you base it on existing sources – and were they easy to
find? Did you do fieldwork or interviews – and what was that like?
I based my research 100% on existing sources; it was a literature review.
Carrying out field research on this topic would be very helpful but very
complicated due to language barriers and due to the fact that it would take a
long time to carry out the interviews and process all the data. Therefore, I
based it on all sorts of literature I was able to find. It was challenging to
find the literature I needed for it, as you know, there is not much information
out there on stateless persons. I was lucky to find some reports in which
stateless persons described their feelings of belonging to the place where they
had grown up their entire lives.
What was the greatest challenge you had to deal with
in undertaking your research?
The greatest challenge was definitely finding literature, since there is
not much information out there that can give us a clear view into the
identities of stateless persons. One of the most difficult parts was reading
and actually understanding the socio-psychological theories and being able to
explain them in writing. In Liberal Arts and Sciences, I majored in law, so
almost every course I took was a law course. Therefore, I was used to reading
legal texts and understanding them. However, social sciences texts,
particularly social psychology ones were very confusing for me! I took a few
social sciences courses during my bachelor, but none on social psychology, so
it was very challenging to read and understand the texts. It was also a lot of
fun to get to explore an area that I found so interesting but I was very
unfamiliar with.
Could you briefly summarise your main findings or
conclusions – or what you think is the most important outcome of your research?
-Citizenship is the legal “confirmation” of a person’s belonging to a
group; it cannot be determined simply by looking at a person (this is a
rejection of ethnicity and race as the basis of citizenship). A “social fact of
attachment” must be determined for citizenship to be properly attributed to an
individual
-the social fact of attachment is not tangible; it is embedded in the
individual’s identity, so it is important to see how this identity developed
and what influenced it. The 3 theories of identity can help explain how
identity develops in relation to place and group. Our identities are influenced
by our surroundings and the people who surround us. It can be said that the
development of our identity is influenced by the country we live in.
-the principles of jus soli and jus sanguinis, which are meant to prove
membership through birth on the territory or through blood, are unable to
prevent people from becoming stateless, due to strict application of these
principles by some states. This strict application makes it easy to exclude
people from the citizenry, even though many of these excluded persons have
social facts of attachment with said state.
-the principle of jus connectionis which takes into account connections and
attachment to a place fills this gap left by the jus soli and jus sanguinis
principles. Therefore, the principle of jus connectionis, since it takes into
account identity, could serve as a safeguard against statelessness for persons
who are excluded from the citizenry since they have no legal claims to
citizenship through birth or through blood but do have a claim through their
social fact of attachment to their homeland.
Have you found it rewarding to research statelessness
– why / why not?
I have found doing research on statelessness—and nationality—the most
rewarding experience of my life. I was lucky to intern at the statelessness
programme last semester and it was the best, and now I am writing my master
thesis on nationality, which I absolutely love. While it focuses on
nationality, the idea behind it is finding a new way to help stateless persons.
Once you jump on the statelessness train, you won’t be getting off for a long
time. There is still so much research to be done that you will never run out of
ideas on new things to research on.
What tips would you give to students who are getting
involved in statelessness research to help them? E.g. are there particular
questions you think they should be looking at or methodological issues they
should consider?
Find a topic you find interesting, it will make the process (it’s a long
and considerably exhausting process) very enjoyable. I really hope someday
someone can go out into the field and carry out interviews to find out more
about the identities of the stateless individuals interviewed and maybe use
some of the theoretical background I presented in my thesis and use their field
results and see what happens! It would be a very large project that would
benefit from an interdisciplinary approach, but if it ever happens I will
definitely read that paper! I think in terms of finding concrete solutions for
statelessness there is a lot of research that can be done, particularly looking
into how specific countries or regions can find concrete solutions for
statelessness in their territories or in the region. Theory-wise, there is so
much to do! I am fascinated by the theoretical issues. For example finding the
“core” of nationality, or finding concrete reasons to why this concept, which
was meant to include and bond people over their belonging to a place, actually
has left gaps in the law and its implementation that have rendered millions
stateless. One of the problems I had was that there is not much literature out
there, so any contributions to the literature are always welcome, and from any
discipline! I am not an expert but I feel like statelessness cannot be
addressed only from only one discipline: it is such a complex issue that it
needs contributions from various disciplines for a better understanding of it,
and I think that once we understand an issue it is easier to find concrete
long-lasting solutions to it.
