In the first weeks at the Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies (EUI) I’m finalising an article for a special issue on ‘Markers of Identity’ linked to the Oxford Diasporas Programme and its sister programme at the University of Leicester. The article draws on the work I have done for the ‘Stateless Diasporas in the EU’ project with Dr Elena Fiddian Qasmiyeh and Dr Barzoo Eliassi. I’ve presented a draft version of the paper last June in Oxford and was very well received. I’ve now sent the manuscript to the editors, Professor Joanna Story and Dr Iain Walker, that have waited patiently (despite the deadline had passed a few weeks ago). Look forward to hearing their feedback.

Here is the abstract:

This article is an invitation to reflect sociologically on statelessness, to date mostly absent from an otherwise burgeoning sociological debate on citizenship, rights and legal status. Millions of stateless people worldwide challenge a core tenet of state-centric teleological imagination – that in order for the hegemonic state system to work everyone must be a citizen of a state – confirming instead the need for a more nuanced understanding of contemporary forms of membership attentive to the interplay of different rights regimes.

It argues that the experiences of Roma families who have lived for years in Italy in absence of any formal citizenship complicates Hannah Arendt’s powerful and insightful characterisation of stateless people as rightless; the lack of any citizenship doesn’t make them bare life, it reveals instead political subjectivity as an as embodied and emplaced process, where subjects negotiate individually and collectively their position in the world and vis-à-vis the state.