Statelessness is incessantly produced in seas, cities, and law. Building around the postcolonial experiences of this statelessness, Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas (SUNY Press, 2024), edited by Ayşe Çağlar, Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury, and Ranabir Samaddar, examines the entanglements of citizenship policies and practices with the spread of statelessness in contemporary times, something that defies any kind of citizen/stateless binary. These policies are significant, the background of a shift in emphasis from jus soli to jus sanguinis, the proliferation of borderland populations and nowhere people, population flows across (post)colonial border formations and boundary delimitations, and the growth of regional, formal, and informal labor markets characterized by immigrant labor economies.
In this context, this book addresses the distinctive dynamics of the different sites in the production of statelessness and considers the impact of these sites as critical, and does not merely treat them as a backdrop. The contributors argue that these different sites evoke different histories and repertoires and also bring different possibilities of alignment with emerging problematics.
The co-editors of Sites of Statelessness: Laws, Cities, Seas (SUNY Press, 2024)—Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury and Ranabir Samaddar—discussed their book in conversation with Paolo Novak and Yuri Kazepov. The discussion was moderated by Ayşe Çağlar.
Ayşe Çağlar is professor at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Vienna and Permanent Fellow at the Institute for Human Sciences (IWM Vienna).
Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury is a professor of political science at the Rabindra Bharati University, Kolkata, India.
Yuri Kazepov is a professor of urban sociology at the Department of Sociology at the Faculty of Social Sciences (University of Vienna) and principal investigator and speaker of the research platform The Challenges of Urban Futures.
Paolo Novak is a senior lecturer in development studies and co-director of the Centre for Migration and Diaspora Studies (SOAS, University of London).
Ranabir Samaddar is Distinguished Chair Professor of Migration and Forced Migration Studies at the Calcutta Research Group, Kolkata, India.
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