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
Street-Level Bureaucrats Manufacturing Migrants: An Implementation Study of Intentionally Ambiguous Policy Measures to Address Statelessness in the Dominican Republic.
Allison J. Petrozziello
Migration policy implementation studies based on Western European or North American contexts may assume that those affected by a given policy are indeed migrants. In developing country contexts, where undocumented nationals can be indistinguishable from the foreign-born, implementation enables street-level bureaucrats to manufacture migrants out of those deemed not to belong through administrative manoeuvres.
The Dominican Republic provides a critical instance of how street-level bureaucrats can make migrants out of people who never crossed an international border, with devastating impacts on their access to social rights. Most scholarship on the case comes from international law and investigates the 2013 Constitutional Court sentence which retroactively stripped citizenship from an estimated 133,770 descendants of Haitian migrants born in the country dating back to 1929. Less scholarly attention has examined the implementation of subsequent policy measures adopted by the Dominican state—regularisation for migrants, naturalisation for their descendants. Conceptually, this paper situates itself within critical policy studies, combining insights from the bottom-up literature on implementation studies in the “Global South” and critical analysis of policy implementation.
Drawing on a case study complemented by ethnographic observations, the paper argues that in developing country contexts characterised by “intentional ambiguity” (Frost), policy implementation can perpetuate the very problem the policy purports to address. Intentionally ambiguous implementation can serve as a state strategy for signalling a policy change to the international community, whilst the reality on the ground remains unchanged.
Allison J. Petrozziello (2025) Street-Level Bureaucrats Manufacturing Migrants: An Implementation Study of Intentionally Ambiguous Policy Measures to Address Statelessness in the Dominican Republic, Social Policy & Administration, 59:4, 666–678, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/spol.13155
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