The most recent influx of migrants from North African countries to Europe resuscitated the European Union debate on immigration policy. Statelessness in the European Union is a welcome and timely addition to the debate. Moreover, the book is a valuable contribution to the more general ongoing discussion on the changing nature of state sovereignty and its effect on noncitizens and the value of citizenship. The book will be of particular interest to individuals studying issues raised by migration, particularly in Europe, as well as those who study the rights of noncitizens.
The book could be divided into three main parts. The introduction by Caroline Sawyer and Brad K. Blitz carefully delineates the analytical framework of the book, explains the methodology, and places it in the relevant scholarship. The second part, which includes more theoretical and general discussion on the issue of statelessness, includes contributions by Monika Krause, Matthew J. Gibney, Caroline Sawyer, and Brad K. Blitz.
Reference KerberLinda Kerber (2005) notes that it is impossible to avoid mentioning Hannah Arendt's work when discussing the question of statelessness. Sawyer and Blitz's book meets this expectation. Arendt's “the right to have rights,” along with her writings on the rightlessness of stateless persons, is an overarching analytical framework for the publication. Krause's contribution launches the discussion by exploring in depth Arendt's intellectual legacy in relation to the situations and rights of stateless persons.
Matthew Gibney's contribution includes an illuminating overview of theoretical approaches to the questions of membership and exclusion. Caroline Sawyer provides a legal perspective on the status of statelessness within the European Union. As Brad Blitz maps the discourse on the rights of noncitizens, fostered by international organizations and NGOs, he acknowledges that measuring the impact of the discourse on practical changes in policy toward noncitizens requires more exploration.
The third part of the book presents its most significant contribution to the scholarship on statelessness. This part is comprised of research on the situations of stateless persons in four European countries: the United Kingdom, France, Slovenia, and Estonia. The empirical research on the populations in four European countries takes Arendt's description of the stateless population as a baseline against which the situations of stateless persons are explored.
The study is based on focus-group discussions and interviews with stateless persons in four countries, with respect to the three categories of rights: so-called basic rights, social rights, and political rights. The study has a phenomenological character, as it explores the experiences related to or caused by the respondents' statelessness. While each chapter sets the discussion of the rights of stateless persons in the specific legal and sociopolitical context in each country, the concluding chapter by the editors draws some general conclusions.
The editors preface the presentation of the research's results with an in-depth discussion of research agenda and methodology. They acknowledge the challenges faced by the study, including difficulties in accessing hidden populations and doing comparative research across countries. The study draws important conclusions. For example, the demographics of stateless persons differ among countries. For instance, in the UK stateless persons are mostly young, single males, while in Estonia they are more likely to be middle-aged, having been subject to the changes in the nationality rules. It also possible to see across the board that access to employment and the right to work is of the highest importance to stateless individuals. Fear of law enforcement and engagement with the police is a common feature of stateless individuals in the countries under focus.
In the concluding chapter the editors manage to tease out certain commonalities across the cases from the comparative research. However, they stop short of building theory. Indeed, as the introduction indicates, building theory, whether on statelessness or, conversely, on citizenship, was not the aim of the research or its organizers. However, one should keep in mind that the project has enjoyed remarkable financial support, which enabled devising and conducting field study across four different countries. One is reminded of other classical works in the tradition of law and society—for example, Yves Dezalay and Bryant Garth's Reference Dezalay and GarthPalace Wars (2002), where comparative field research across four countries serves as the basis of influential social theory. The opportunities for such expansive comparative studies are quite rare, in particular with regard to the condition of statelessness, which is often overlooked in the larger debates on immigration and citizenship. Therefore, had the editors and organizers behind the project aspired to build a theory of statelessness based on the material and intellectual resources behind it, such an aspiration would have been laudable.
