What accompanies this movement is a complete loss of that primary sense of belonging included as the bedrock of human-rights guarantees: citizenship. In the context of the Holocaust in Europe, Hannah Arendt, the Jewish political theorist, identified "membership in a human community" as the single most important qualification for any assessment of human rights. For her, the 'stateless' are those people who do not even possess the "right to have rights". In post-World War II international legal formulations, however, the 'refugee' and the 'stateless person' cannot be conflated. Though uprooted, refugees still legally possess affiliation to a state, even while the citizenship guarantee is almost nonexistent because the very state that is expected to protect the individual as a citizen becomes the reason for that person's persecution.
Globalisation has brought with it the ability of dramatically greater numbers of people to move across international borders for better prospects. The paradox, however, is that many are making these journeys under duress, oftentimes because the place they called home has been taken away from them – be it due to wars that claim to usher in peace, or calculated pogroms that aim to rid a territory of people considered to be 'contaminating' a community's cultural 'purity'.
Those who do not, or cannot, 'fit in' are either forced out or left to wither. The story of the Muslims in India, Hindus and Chakma in Bangladesh, Tamil in Sri Lanka, Ahmadi in Pakistan, Lhotshampa in Bhutan, Chin and Rohingya in Burma, Uighur and Buddhists in China-occupied Tibet, Tutsi in Rwanda and almost all non-whites in the Euro-Americas are the manifestation of the violence of nation-state formations that dominate or eliminate. What follows this 'domestic' loss of citizenship is an excruciating incidence of persecution: If you do not flee, you will die.
The loss of citizenship begins at the time when people are segregated within their own countries on the basis of various identities – class, caste, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, religion, location, language – in a way that impacts on their access to fundamental human-rights guarantees. This segregation does not remain a mere administrative device, but turns into a tool for structural exclusion, disenfranchisement and violence. That is the point at which the state suddenly turns into a particular form of nation state, the primary objective of which is to produce a population of people who think alike, speak the same language (of political ideology and culture), or belong to the same ethnic, religious or linguistic community.