‘Piercing The Veil' of Human Rights Discourse on Statelessness

Abstract

Sociological inquiry treats the field of human rights as a lived reality in which people live and act rather than a field of political discourse.  The subjects towards whom human rights organisations direct their efforts are vulnerable and hard to reach. This makes access and representation difficult for all the humanitarian organisations that try to help them.  However, these organisations share some responsibility for the discourse they create to attract attention to humanitarian issues. Some claims made about the social nature of the stateless population have not always been beneficent for them, but have been used to promote a broader argument for citizen women's rights. The intense level of feminist rhetoric used in the human rights field is a fertile area of research.  By way of example, I employ Jasinki's (2001) notion of the close reading method to ‘pierce the veil that covers the text,' to make a close reading of a humanitarian field report on statelessness in Kuwait.  Deconstructing the rhetoric in the report, I ask whether Discrimination Against Women really does ‘CreateStatelessness'?  The nature of such discourse on the statelessness could just as easily render the community victims of politics, as victims of their problematic legal status.  Closer attention to methodology and context might do more justice for the stateless.