This book is about belonging in a world carved into states. It asks us to examine our taken for granted assumption that we all seamlessly fall into place as citizens of one state or another and that we are able to retain the citizenship we acquired at birth throughout our life. Millions of people around the world have no citizenship. They do not formally belong anywhere.

      Take a moment and imagine what it must be like not to exist in the eyes of a state’s bureaucratic machinery, not to be protected by national laws, not to have access to—or the ability to exercise—the rights and freedoms that are bound up with a particular state’s citizenship. What must it be like to be physically present, to have tried to make a life in a place, yet to be rejected by the place you consider home? What must it be like to see others, born in the same place that you were,