This welcome collection of essays provides a wealth of new and interesting perspectives on discussions of statelessness and citizenship. The book largely focuses on Asia, with a chapter or two from elsewhere—rather than, as is so often the case, a couple of “rest of world” chapters within a collection on Europe and North America.

The contributions are wide-ranging, covering topics as diverse as the status of minorities within newly independent post-colonial states, the situation of trafficked women in West Bengal, the hosting of Partition refugees and the more recently displaced in India, the treatment of refugees crossing the Aegean Sea, the semi-slavery of those working on boats under flags of convenience, and the poverty of urban slums in India and Brazil. While most authors are writing within a sociological or anthropological tradition, the collection is truly interdisciplinary, encompassing approaches from legal analysis to literary criticism. There are chapters setting out contestations of citizenship and statelessness within the framework of the European Convention on Human Rights; providing a detailed historical account of the 1914 voyage of a ship taking Sikhs from Hong Kong to Canada but diverted to Calcutta (with Punjab as the intended eventual destination), where their protests were met with lethal force; and analyzing the novel Sea of Poppies by Amitav Ghosh, which tells the intertwined stories of the British empire’s export of indentured labor from India and forced cultivation of opium. This diversity is a source of strength, providing insightful glimpses into the travails of those living for different reasons on the margins of society.

Only the chapter on the European human rights framework by Elspeth Guild and Sandra Mantu considers statelessness as the lack of legally recognized citizenship. Many of the other authors begin by explaining that they consider the legal definitions of citizenship and statelessness to be inadequate, and thus the concept of statelessness should encompass a broader range of types of exclusion and rightlessness, including the situations of people living in conditions akin to slavery or subjected to coercive migration control. The widening of the definition of statelessness to include a broader set of issues is a potentially helpful analytical tool to find commonalities among the situation of otherwise apparently disparate groups. And since there is a long-standing recognition by states in treaties and international policy discussions that statelessness is an evil, it can also be helpful for advocacy reasons to include a wider set of people within the definition of “stateless person” than a narrow legalistic category.

However, I found the lack of a consistent definition of statelessness frustrating. Although an edited volume will always have some variations in emphasis and approach, there does not seem to have been any discussion among the authors to arrive at a shared understanding of the concept under examination. Moreover, significant writing in the same space that could have informed this discussion has not been considered, such as Slippery Citizenship edited by Rhoda Howard-Hassman and Margaret Walton-Roberts (2015), several volumes by Tendayi Bloom (e.g., Tendayi Bloom and Lindsey Kingston, eds., Statelessness, Governance and the Problem of Citizenship, 2021), several chapters in the Routledge and Oxford Handbooks on citizenship (see Engin Isin and Peter Nyers, eds., Routledge Handbook of Global Citizenship Studies, 2014; Ayelet Shachar, Rainer Bauboeck, Irene Bloemraad, and Maarten Vink, eds., The Oxford Handbook on Citizenship, 2017), or even the literature on Indian citizenship from authors such as Niraja Gopal Jayal (Citizenship and Its Discontents: An Indian History, 2013)or Sarah Ansari and William Gould (Boundaries of Belonging: Localities, Citizenship and Rights in India and Pakistan, 2019). The book also fails to engage with international policy debates around statelessness following the launch of UNHCR’s #IBELONG campaign in 2014, including extended guidance on the definition of stateless person and on the obligations of states to prevent and reduce statelessness, nor with the scholarly and civil society commentary critiquing the UNHCR positions.

Thus, the authors are not fully aware of the extent to which their concerns are already the subject of debate in the existing literature, on which they could build to help establish a shared understanding of what “statelessness” is, whether for this book or for a broader scholarly understanding. In the introduction, Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury, Ayşe Çağlar, and Ranabir Samaddar assert that the classical idea of statelessness originates from succession of states, or “as a form of refugee existence” (pp. 1–2). Efadul Huq and Faranak Miraftab state breezily that “Conventionally, statelessness can result from various geopolitical realignments among states, as well as racialized and ethnicized populations,” then extending the definition to include “informal settlement dwellers [who] do not experience the promised rights that come with citizenship” (pp. 107–108). Similarly, Michel Agier analyzes statelessness as fundamentally a question of discrimination against “undesirables.” In a somewhat different context, the fascinating chapter by Joyce CH Liew, Yu Fan Chiu and Jonathan S. Parhusip on hyper-exploited crews of fishing vessels describes their situation of quasi-slavery as statelessness, without further discussion (p. 217). On the other hand, several authors assume that statelessness affects mostly people who have moved or been displaced from a place “of origin,” whether within one state or across borders: Nergis Canefe, for example, states that “the majority of the stateless remain on the move” (p. 57). Nasreen Chowdhory and Shamna Thacham Poyil, among several inspired by the writings of Hannah Arendt, consider the nature of political agency among refugees living in camps as analogous to statelessness. However, it is only Sucharita Sengupta who engages in some detail with the distinction and linkages between refugees and stateless persons as they are today described in international law, 75 years after Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism was completed, in an analysis of the situation of those Rohingya who have taken to sea to seek asylum. Though statistics are very hard to come by, and are themselves dependent on definitions, it is likely that most stateless people are not displaced or migrants, and are rather living in their country of birth and life-long residence.

There are references here and there to concepts such as jus soli and jus sanguinis rules on attribution of citizenship to children at birth or to the lack of access to naturalization for refugees or other migrants, but none of the chapters considering the Asian context look at the legal reasons for statelessness to persist over many generations settled in the same place. This is the case even for Paula Banerjee and Sangbida Lahiri, who provide a detailed account of India’s laws relating to forced labor and trafficking in persons. In describing the statelessness of trafficked women working as indentured sex workers in West Bengal, they do not pay the same attention to the legal framework for recognition of citizenship and legal status in India, nor the ongoing impact of Partition on the interpretation of those rules.

The decision to disregard legal frameworks for citizenship is logical if statelessness is an umbrella term to cover many different types of exclusion. But if the specific concept of statelessness adds no additional explanatory force compared to other concepts describing discrimination, poverty, and disadvantage, the widening of its definition seems to operate purely at a rhetorical level. My view would be that much as statelessness is open to many forms of analysis beyond the strictly legal, it is through law that states delineate who belongs, and at least some engagement with the laws establishing citizenship and the means to prove it are therefore needed.

In summary, the book richly delivers on two of the three elements of its subtitle—laws, cities, seas—through its ethnographic treatment of specific sites of exclusion, but what is missing is the first element of the subtitle, that of laws. Without any discussion of the legal element, it is not clear if it is analytically useful to describe the phenomena being discussed as statelessness. If I were recommending a book to start from for an understanding of the different configurations of statelessness in Asia, I would turn to the very recent volume (published after the book under review) jointly edited by Michelle Foster, Jaclyn Neo, and Christoph Sperfeldt (Statelessness in Asia, 2025).