Studies in Global Justice and Human Rights Series Editor: Thom Brooks This series publishes ground-breaking work on key topics in the area of global justice and human rights including democracy, gender, poverty, the environment, and just war. Books in the series are of broad interest to theorists working in politics, international relations, philosophy, and related disciplines. Retheorising Statelessness A Background Theory of Membership in World Politics Kelly Staples /Develops a critical understanding of the relationship between individuality and recognition in world politics/ Stateless persons are increasingly a concern of governments, international agencies and NGOs. Kelly Staples offers a much-needed political theorisation of statelessness, and of the principles and practices of membership and protection in 21st-century international politics. She applies international political theory to statelessness as an ethical and political concern, bridging empirical and legal accounts of statelessness and existing theoretical accounts of membership, rights and protection. Key Features * Sets out a theory of membership showing how the value of membership in state communities derives from widespread global constitutive practices * Combines theory with contemporary case studies (on the Democratic Republic of Congo and on the Rohingya of Burma, Bangladesh, Malaysia and Thailand) to demonstrate the connection between protections of state membership, perceived burdens of statelessness and the situation of stateless persons * Uses the author's framework membership theory to illustrate the relationship between existing protections of membership and future recognition and protection of stateless persons * Highlights the value of extending international mechanisms of identity to stateless persons Kelly Staples is a Lecturer in International Politics at the University of Leicester.