The story of how a much-contested legal category—statelessness—transformed the international legal order and redefined the relationship between states and their citizens. Two world wars left millions stranded in Europe. The collapse of empires and the rise of independent states in the twentieth century produced an unprecedented number of people without national belonging and with nowhere to go. Mira Siegelberg’s innovative history weaves together ideas about law and politics, rights and citizenship, with the intimate plight of stateless persons, to explore how and why the problem of statelessness compelled a new understanding of the international order in the twentieth century and beyond. In the years following the First World War, the legal category of statelessness generated novel visions of cosmopolitan political and legal organization and challenged efforts to limit the boundaries of national membership and international authority. Yet, as Siegelberg shows, the emergence of mass statelessness ultimately gave rise to the rights regime created after World War II, which empowered the territorial state as the fundamental source of protection and rights, against alternative political configurations. Today we live with the results: more than twelve million people are stateless and millions more belong to categories of recent invention, including refugees and asylum seekers. By uncovering the ideological origins of the international agreements that define categories of citizenship and non-citizenship, Statelessness better equips us to confront current dilemmas of political organization and authority at the global level.

'Statelessness' is a legal status denoting lack of any nationality, a status whereby the otherwise normal link between an individual and a state is absent. The increasingly widespread problem of statelessness has profound legal, social, economic and psychological consequences but also gives rise to the paradox of an international community that claims universal standards for all natural persons while allowing its member states to allow statelessness to occur. In this powerfully argued book, Conklin critically evaluates traditional efforts to recognize and reduce statelessness. The problem, he argues, rests in the obligatory nature of law, domestic or international. By closely analysing a broad spectrum of court and tribunal judgments from many jurisdictions, Conklin explains how confusion has arisen between two discourses, the one discourse inside the other, as to the nature of the international community. One discourse, a surface discourse, describes a community in which international law justifies a state's freedom to confer, withdraw or withhold nationality. This international community incorporates state freedom over nationality matters, bringing about the de jure and effective stateless condition. The other discourse, an inner discourse, highlights a legal bond of socially experienced relationships. Such a bond, judicially referred to as 'effective nationality', is binding upon all states, and where such a bond exists, harm to a stateless person represents harm to the international community as a whole.

How does Manhattan’s 47th Street diamond district thrive as an ethnic marketplace without lawyers, courts, and state coercion? Barak Richman draws on insider interviews to show why relational exchange based on familiarity, trust, and community enforcement succeeds and what it reveals about the modern state’s limitations in governing the economy.

This is the first book on Italian colonialism that specifically deals with the question of citizenship/subjecthood. Such a topic is crucial for understanding both Italian imperial rule and the complex dynamics of the different colonial societies where several actors, like notables, political leaders, minorities, etc., were involved. The chapters gathered in the book constitute an unprecedented account of a heterogeneous geographical area. The cases of Eritrea, Libya, Dodecanese, Ethiopia, and Albania confirm that citizenship and subjecthood in the colonial context were ductile political tools, which were structured according to the orientations of the Metropole and the challenges that came from the colonial societies, often swinging between submission, cooptation to the colonial power, and resistance. On one hand, the book offers an account of the different policies of citizenship implemented in the Italian colonies, in particular the construction of gradated forms of citizenship, the repression and expulsion of dissidents, the systems of endearment of local people and cooptation of the elites, and the racialization of legal status. On the other, it deals with the various answers coming from the local populations in terms of resistance, negotiation, and construction of social identity.

During World War II and the early Cold War period, factors such as race, gender, sexual orientation, or class made a number of American writers feel marginalized in U.S. society. Cosmopolitan Minds focuses on a core of transnational writers—Kay Boyle, Pearl S. Buck, William Gardner Smith, Richard Wright, and Paul Bowles—who found themselves prompted to seek experiences outside of their home country, experiences that profoundly changed their self-understanding and creative imagination as they encountered alternative points of views and cultural practices in Europe, Asia, and Africa. Alexa Weik von Mossner offers a new perspective on the affective underpinnings of critical and reflexive cosmopolitanism by drawing on theories of emotion and literary imagination from cognitive psychology, philosophy, and cognitive literary studies. She analyzes how physical dislocation, and the sometimes violent shifts in understanding that result from our affective encounters with others, led Boyle, Buck, Smith, Wright, and Bowles to develop new, cosmopolitan solidarities across national, ethnic, and religious boundaries. She also shows how, in their literary texts, these writers employed strategic empathy to provoke strong emotions such as love, sympathy, compassion, fear, anger, guilt, shame, and disgust in their readers in order to challenge their parochial worldviews and practices. Reading these texts as emotionally powerful indictments of institutionalized racism and national violence inside and outside of the United States, Weik von Mossner demonstrates that our emotional engagements with others—real and imagined—are crucially important for the development of transnational and cosmopolitan imaginations.

Scrutinizes spectacular rhetoric, the use of visual images and imagery to construct certain bodies, populations, and nations as victims and incorporate them into human rights discourses geared toward Westerners.