Today, 1 November 2021, the UNHCR recognizes 26.4 million people in flight –seeking refuge outside of their countries of origin (who bear legal responsibility for inclusion of nationals within the international nation state system of laws and recognitions). A further 4.2 million people are recognized to live in statelessness. About half of the people who embody these statistics are children. To be stateless is to exist outside of international human rights frameworks. The place of statelessness is the ultimate state of exception.

“The relation of exception is a relation of ban. He who has been banned is not, in fact, simply set outside the law and made indifferent to it but rather abandoned by it, that is, exposed and threatened on the threshold in which life and law, outside and inside, become indistinguishable. It is literally not possible to say whether the one who has been banned is outside or inside the juridical order.”

Giorgio Agamben Homer Sacer 2013

© nichola feldman-kiss 2021