Who counts as a stateless person? Nation-statist logics and the liabilities of potential citizenship elsewhere
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines how the definition of statelessness is contested below the formal letter of the law in Malaysia. Analysing court cases, interviews with lawyers, and public discourse, I encounter a paradox: that stateless people in Malaysia are produced through juridical, bureaucratic, and discursive repudiations of their claims to statelessness. Adhering to “nation-statist logics,” Malaysian state actors commonly reject citizenship claimants’ assertions of being stateless by classifying them instead as foreigners, thus shunting responsibility for their inclusion elsewhere beyond Malaysian borders. These practices disproportionately burden minorities with racialized, migrant backgrounds with presumptions of having “potential citizenship” elsewhere, even if such links are tenuous or merely theoretical. By centering how stateless people articulate their belonging in the face of abject exclusion, and how categories of stateless and citizen are flexibly mobilized in legal, political, and social spheres, this article offers new avenues for critiquing the normativity of the contemporary nation-state system.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.054 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.011 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".