International law and scholarship lack an agreed vocabulary to refer to the status of people who do not have a recognised citizenship (‘citizenship’ is used here as a synonym for nationality, the term usually used in international law) and yet are also not recognised as stateless. There have been important efforts by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’) to clarify and extend the interpretation of the definition of ‘stateless person’. There is, however, a continued lack of settled vocabulary for those who are in ‘stateless-adjacent’ situations, whose status as a national of any particular country or as a stateless person is not (yet) clear. This article considers the use of terminology in two contexts: litigation on behalf of affected people and the collection of statistics about the size of stateless populations. The article emphasises the importance of framing and choice of terminology and proposes a preferred lexicon for use in relation to statelessness, undetermined nationality and risks of statelessness. It puts forward the term ‘presumptive nationality’ to refer to the status of people whose closest connections are to their state of residence but who have no recognised nationality.International law and scholarship lack an agreed vocabulary to refer to the status of people who do not have a recognised citizenship (‘citizenship’ is used here as a synonym for nationality, the term usually used in international law) and yet are also not recognised as stateless. There have been important efforts by the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (‘UNHCR’) to clarify and extend the interpretation of the definition of ‘stateless person’. There is, however, a continued lack of settled vocabulary for those who are in ‘stateless-adjacent’ situations, whose status as a national of any particular country or as a stateless person is not (yet) clear.

Bronwen Manby, Schrödinger’s Citizenship: Framing Perspectives for the Resolution of Statelessness, Statelessness & Citizenship Review, 2024.