Research
Intersectionality as method for human rights research: Identifying who is made stateless and how through UN treaty body reviews
Allison J. Petrozziello
Few theories have generated the kind of international and interdisciplinary engagement as intersectionality. Nevertheless, intersectionality as a research paradigm has yet to gain ground in human rights research. People can experience the same rights violation on multiple grounds, yet human rights research design and methods—like rights frameworks and treaty bodies themselves—tend to examine each form of discrimination separately or additively. This article demonstrates the value of intersectionality as a methodological approach for human rights research by discussing feminist methodological insights developed through a global qualitative study of exclusionary birth registration practices that lead to statelessness. The discussion highlights three intersections that block access to birth certificates: gender, religious, and ethnic discrimination at the civil registrar; disability and ethnic discrimination in contexts of mobility; and discrimination based on gender, race, and migration status in reproductive healthcare. The conclusion offers human rights researchers an intersectional method for analyzing observations from all human rights mechanisms on a particular issue, to gain a more fulsome understanding of the operations of power that violate rights.
Allison J. Petrozziello (2025) Intersectionality as method for human rights research: Identifying who is made stateless and how through UN treaty body reviews, Journal of Human Rights, 24:2, 182-198, DOI: 10.1080/14754835.2025.2477493
Birth Registration as Bordering Practice: Theorizing States’ Production of Statelessness among Migrants’ Descendants
Allison J. Petrozziello
Around the world migrants’ descendants face a heightened risk of statelessness—and not only
in contexts of forced migration. As states securitize both identity and migration management
systems, how might the introduction of ‘bordering practices’ prevent racialized people on the
move from proving their identity and claiming citizenship—in any country—for their progeny?
This paper advances an intersectional feminist and multiscalar border theory of how states
produce statelessness among migrants’ descendants by restricting access to birth certificates
and proof of citizenship. It engages in mid-range theory building based on content analysis of the
author’s global inventory of UN treaty body recommendations on birth registration issued to
58 countries across the five major world regions. The evidence demonstrates that far from
being upheld as a fundamental human right, birth registration can function as a bordering
practice for children born to those whom a given state is unwilling to recognize. A typology of
bordering practices is proposed, comprised of corporeal, social, spatial, and temporal types.
This enables researchers to analytically distinguish the types of practices which produce
intergenerational statelessness in diverse contexts of human mobility. The framework makes a
novel and interdisciplinary contribution to international studies of migration, human rights,
citizenship, statelessness, and gender.
Conference Paper
Canadian Political Science Association 2025