This thesis explores how stateless people are constituted and treated within the global refugee regime. Building upon existing literature on norm reversion and evasion, it argues that the regime was founded in a Westphalian, state-centric model, and that this has excluded stateless people from fully accessing its normative protections. Using the Rohingya as a case study, my research employs a triangulated, qualitative methodology that draws from two complementary sources: secondary interviews with stateless individuals, and documents from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) online archives. The findings reveal marked discrepancies between the lived experiences of stateless people and humanitarian discourse, calling for a reassessment of humanitarian governance that better serves the needs of stateless communities. To conclude, I offer recommendations for further research, and invite scholars to reimagine belonging beyond the norms of Westphalian territoriality that exclude stateless people.
Peter Rusafov (Sun,) studied this question.