To Be Without a Nationality: When Existence Becomes an Exception - Mohammed Al-Fazari

 

Introduction to the Second Issue of Munasara Magazine – Muwatin Media Network

In this second issue of Munasara Magazine, we shed light on one of the most complex and marginalized issues in the Arab world: statelessness. An issue that may appear, on the surface, to be merely legal and bureaucratic, but at its core is a shocking mirror reflecting deeper imbalances — in the structure of the state, in the concepts of citizenship, in the human relationship to place, and in the power to grant acceptance and recognition.

To be “stateless” does not only mean being without documents; it means being outside recognition, outside official language, outside protection, and outside the collective imagination. In this legal and political void, it is not only rights that disappear; the very essence of being human is shaken — the ability to be, to be seen, to be heard. Everything we take as a given — going to school, opening a bank account, travelling, registering a child’s birth — becomes a conditional privilege rather than a guaranteed right.

The contributions in this issue — studies, stories, interviews, and intellectual and creative works — uncover the depth of this tragedy, not as an abstract humanitarian issue, but as a political and ethical challenge striking at the core of the concept of citizenship. Not to provoke fleeting sympathy, but to illuminate what has been deliberately kept in the dark — from a position of rights-based duty and journalistic commitment. We read testimonies of people born in a homeland that does not recognize them, of mothers unable to give their children a surname or a nationality, of individuals who have spent their lives “suspended” between physical existence and legal absence. All while remaining conscious of the deep connection between colonialism and nationality laws, and how the states of this region inherited legal systems designed to produce exclusion rather than redistribute belonging.

This issue also ventures into philosophical explorations of the concepts of recognition and identity, and includes legal analyses exposing how the law is used as a tool to reproduce social hierarchies. The discussion goes beyond simply documenting the denial of rights — it extends to a fundamental questioning of what “identity” itself means, and whether nationality, as a right, should be tied to the whims of states and the boundaries of geography. Alongside this, we highlight the role of art as a symbolic tool capable of unearthing the deepest layers of suffering experienced daily by stateless people. This issue features artistic and human attempts to rewrite human presence in the face of symbolic erasure.

We also read about resistance — about women, men, and children who are reshaping life outside the system, creating their own economies, identities, and circles of support, proving that life is not measured by papers but by action and imagination. They do not stop at the threshold of pain; they reshape their reality from within the margins, writing their stories in their own language, turning their fragility into awareness and creativity. In them, another face of these “dispossessed” emerges — a face of resistance, existential defiance, and living despite everything.