Awards

• Joint winner of Jerry Bentley Book Prize 2021 (United States)
• Runner-up for Laura Shannon Prize 2023 (United States)
• Short-listed for Laura Shannon Prize 2023 (United States)
• Winner of ASIL Certificates of Merit 2022 (United States)
• Winner of Francesco Guicciardini Prize for Best Book in Historical International Relations 2022 (United States)

Overview

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.

Full Product Details

9780674976313

Table of Contents

Reviews

A book equal parts compelling and sobering, Statelessness lives up to the importance of its topic. Siegelberg writes conceptual history for our twenty-first century world.--Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, University of California Berkeley

Mira Siegelberg demonstrates that the question of statelessness, now a relatively minor aspect of a larger refugee crisis, in fact lies at the heart of the transformations in legal consciousness that produced the fragile and often ambiguous post-war international rights regime. Statelessness is an important book and a magnificent achievement.--Mark Mazower, author of Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century A book equal parts compelling and sobering, Statelessness lives up to the importance of its topic. Siegelberg writes conceptual history for our twenty-first-century world.--Stefan-Ludwig Hoffmann, University of California, Berkeley

Author Information

Mira L. Siegelberg is University Lecturer in the History of International Political Thought at the University of Cambridge and a past member of the Princeton Society of Fellows.

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