Course Description
Instances of statelessness and refugeedom dominate headlines today. But what does “statelessness” mean? Rather than solely focusing on contemporary legal interpretations of statelessness, this course emphasizes twentieth century global, regional, and national histories within which statelessness emerged as a political and legal category.
Additional Requirements for Graduate Students:
Additional graduate-level research will be required and writing in the form of a more substantial, in-depth research paper will be required of graduate students.
Athena Title
Statelessness in Global Hist
Undergraduate Pre or Corequisite
One course in HIST or INTL or POLS or RELI or LEGL or SOCI or GEOG or GPST or RELI or GLOB or WMST
Grading System
A - F (Traditional)
Student learning Outcomes
- Students will be able to distinguish between different categories of displacement, including refugeedom and statelessness.
- Students will be able to locate nationality not only as an international legal category, but as emerging from within national and regional histories.
- Students will be able to articulate in concrete terms, the challenges associated with writing histories of statelessness – access to archival materials, the ethics of conducting oral history interviews with displaced persons, and confidentiality.
- Students will be able to draw links between legal histories of displacement and contemporary developments such as climate-change induced displacement.
Topical Outline
- Introductions
- Identifying Keywords – “migrant,” “refugee,” “alien,” “stateless person”
- The History of Nationality as an International Legal Category and the Role of Empire
- The Role of Passports as Travel Documents and Identity Documents
- World War II and the Right to Have Rights
- The Legal History of the UN Conventions on the Status of Refugees and the Status of Stateless Persons
- Partitions and the Creation of Stateless Populations
- The Cold War and the Uneven Development of the International Refugee Regime
- The UNHCR Case Files as a Historical Source
- The UK and its Asylum Policies: A Historical Perspective
- Working with Materials from UGA Special Collections
- Climate Refugees: A new legal category to address statelessness?
- Conclusions and Presentations
