The invisible crisis that strips people of citizenship

Citizenship is easy to take for granted when you receive it automatically and never have to defend it

Originally published on Global Voices

This post is part of Global Voices’ July 2026 Spotlight series, “Statelessness.” This series offers insight into the issue of statelessness and how it hinders people’s freedom of movement, educational opportunities, political access, and more. You can support this coverage by donating here.

I’ve been aware of statelessness as a desperately important and under-reported problem for years, first writing about it in 2017. It fascinates me in large part because of its near-invisibility: As many of our articles this month observe, citizenship is easy to take for granted when you receive it automatically at birth and never have to defend it.

Despite my long interest, it has only been since Global Voices started working closely with the Global Movement Against Statelessness (GMAS), our partner on our July 2026 Spotlight series, “Statelessness,” that I have started to grasp the wide variety of ways in which people become stateless, and the variable effects it has. I associated statelessness with refugee status, with groups that, usually for reasons of bigotry, were unwanted in their countries of origin. That’s certainly one reason for statelessness, and we can see some of its many forms in the spotlight, as in this story about an artist from Myanmar struggling to rebuild in France, or this one about a trans woman who fled Russia.

Talking with members of GMAS and attending some of their events, I learned about other ways that statelessness can happen to people, often through the banality of bureaucracy unwilling to deal with edge cases. Quite often those administrative traps also include built-in bigotry: for example, the case of Japanese-Filipino children born in Japan, or the way that in the Gulf states women cannot pass their nationality to their children.

For others, it is the country that has changed, as when the USSR collapsed. Or, there are groups that have never had their own state, and have never been allowed to fully fit in to the country where they live, as in this collaborative article about Roma in Ukraine and Tatars in Russia. Similar dynamics apply to the Roma in the former Yugoslavia as well.

Perhaps most chilling is when the threat of statelessness is used to enforce oppression and authoritarianism, as in the case of the new law allowing Cambodia to revoke citizenship for certain offenses. This month’s Undertones narrative analysis column examines how such threats are justified in the context of Nicaragua, which enacted a similar law in 2023.

Still, some of the pieces I found most moving this month were the essays from people who felt dislocated from their homeland or country: a Venezuelan exile unable to return from Mexico to help after the earthquake because a precarious status doesn’t allow travel; a Cantonese opera reminding someone who fled Hong Kong of all that has changed.

There are also articles reminding us about the precarious, uncertain, administrative documentation underpinning all of our nationalities. In India, for example, a recent set of headlines reminded people that a passport is not in fact proof of citizenship. Especially in a country where citizenship requirements have changed recently, that means that proving citizenship can be a complicated process — as the article tells us, “A birth certificate […] is usually enough if you were born before 1987. Those born between 1987 and 2003 need to show that at least one of their parents was also a citizen of India, and those born after 2003 need to show that both parents were citizens or at least legally in India.” This is complex, and for many people impossible, since “even as recently as 2019, nearly 40 percent of children under the age of five did not have a birth certificate.”

Citizenship can slip away from us, and states do not always honor their own obligations to parse through the complex, often arbitrary proof they require.

Statelessness is important in its own right, because of the devastating impacts it can have on people’s lives. It’s also a reminder for those of us who don’t normally think about it that we should never take citizenship for granted. That means not only appreciating what we have, but also questioning why it is the way it is. Citizenship isn’t automatic, inevitable, or even uniform across different nations; the way it works is the result of a series of decisions. This spotlight on statelessness illuminates the ways those choices needlessly hurt millions of people.