Transnational Nomadic Epistemologies & Stateless Subaltern Struggles: On the Coloniality of International Human Rights on Statelessness

Academic discussions and international efforts such as the UNHCR’s global iBelong campaign (2014) that aim to prevent and “end statelessness” are mostly oriented toward citizenship acquisition. In this article, we critically explore the coloniality of international human rights discourses in relation to statelessness. The coloniality of the prevailing knowledge systems of international human rights, with its time–space provincialism, and its gendered and racialized underpinnings, puts in place particular forms of epistemic and political erasures that informs dominant knowledge production and representations of statelessness which view it as a ‘problem’ to be resolved. This knowledge, we argue, is rooted in a Eurocentric political history that forms the field's conceptual terms, theoretical frameworks, and philosophical principles. But is statelessness a ‘problem’ to be resolved? And does the term ‘stateless’ include the subaltern struggles of stateless people in ‘most of the world’? We insist on a critical reflexive feminist politics of location that centres a subaltern group not often recognized as having political and epistemic presence: the stateless ‘Bidoon Jinsiyya’ (translating to ‘without citizenship’) in Kuwait. The Bidoon are nomadic and transnational Bedouin tribes who became stateless due to state formation processes, the introduction of citizenship and border regimes, and developmentalist dispossession in the Arabian Peninsula. By focusing on the life histories, nomadic epistemologies, and contemporary subaltern struggles of the Bidoon, this paper challenges the coloniality of international human rights in two ways: First by arguing that global human rights discourse on statelessness reproduces colonial, depoliticized, decontextualized and developmentalist narratives that are embedded in “methodological nationalism” (Wimmer & Schiller 2002), reifying the nation-state as an essentialized ontological category and state-centric notions of sovereignty, territoriality, and membership. Second, it argues that the coloniality of international human rights on statelessness makes “unthinkable” (Trouillot, 1995) the epistemic agency and political imaginaries of stateless rights mobilisations.