Drunken Boat Issue 26

A stateless nation of approximately three million people whose seven historical territories span more than 20,000 square kilometers on both the French and Spanish sides of the northwestern Pyrenees, speaking Euskara, a language linguistically unrelated to any other on earth.

Roma, Egyptian, and Ashkali groups in Europe are ethnic and cultural minorities historically associated with nomadism who have faced persecution throughout European history, with an estimated 10–12 million Roma across the continent holding precarious or no legal nationality.

Over half of the Palestinian people in the world are stateless, a condition rooted in the 1948 displacement (Nakba) and compounded by decades of occupation, with Palestinians in Gaza, the West Bank, and diaspora countries holding no recognized sovereign citizenship.

The Bihari became stateless after Bangladesh refused to grant them citizenship because of their support for Pakistan in the Bangladesh Liberation War, while Pakistan insisted Bangladesh bore responsibility for them, leaving roughly 300,000 Urdu-speaking Biharis in limbo for decades until a partial legal resolution in 2008.

Tibet's declaration of independence in 1913 was never recognized internationally, and it was absorbed by the People's Republic of China in 1951, which claims Tibet as an integral part of China while the Tibetan government-in-exile maintains it remains under unlawful occupation, leaving over 100,000 Tibetan exiles in India and Nepal in legal limbo.

The Maasai people once had a sovereign territory stretching 700 miles north to south from northern Kenya to central Tanzania, but the creation of those two nation-states resulted in the permanent loss of their sovereignty and systems of government, with their pastoralist lands continuing to be seized by governments and foreign corporations today.

Myanmar's 1982 Citizenship Law excludes the Rohingya by not recognizing them as an ethnic group, creating some 700,000 stateless persons and precipitating both a genocide and an international refugee crisis.

A Turkic Muslim people of roughly 12 million, the Uyghurs are the native population of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region within China, facing mass detention, cultural erasure, and surveillance, with those in diaspora often unable to renew passports or return home without risk of imprisonment.

More than 587,000 stateless people in Thailand include members of ethnic hill tribes such as the Hmong, who live in the mountainous border regions with Myanmar and Laos and who, having fought alongside the U.S. in the Secret War in Laos, were scattered into a diaspora denied legal nationality by multiple states.

An estimated 700,000 stateless people in Côte d'Ivoire are of Burkinabé descent, migrants who were not eligible for Ivorian nationality after the country's independence from France in 1960 and whose colonial-era labor in cocoa and coffee fields was never converted into legal belonging.

The Kuwaiti Bidoon (short for Bidoon Jinsiya, meaning "without nationality" in Arabic) number between 88,000 and 106,000 and are descendants of nomadic Bedouin tribes who once moved freely across the Gulf region but were denied citizenship when Kuwait formalized its borders.