ABSTRACT
As part of the larger trend towards “securitization” of citizenship,
citizenship deprivation in Canada is becoming increasingly normalized, resulting in
some cases in statelessness. In this article, I pursue a sociology of statelessness by
examining its localized production and connections to a broader network of social
and material relations. I do this through a case study of Canadian-born Deepan
Budlakoti, who at age 22 was informed that he was in fact not Canadian, and lacking
any other citizenship, was rendered stateless. Actor-Network Theory is employed to
trace how it is that legal documental and heterogeneous networks of humans and
things (e.g., a “legal technicality”) have been enrolled to produce a legal decision
declaring that Budlakoti, despite his Canadian birth certificate and passports, was
never a Canadian citizen. Yet because he has not exhausted all avenues to acquisition
of some citizenship (e.g., in India or Canada), he also has failed to secure recognition
of his statelessness. A particular innovation in this analysis is the exploration of the
exemption in the Canadian Citizenship Act from jus soli citizenship for children born
to foreign diplomatic staff. Networks of immigration tribunal and court judgements,
and documents treated as evidence have connected and translated into establishing
Budlakoti’s fit with this exemption, despite countervailing evidence and a lifetime of
documented and state-assisted reproduction of his Canadianness. While robbed of his
legal and social identity, and suffering the egregious consequences of statelessness,
Budlakoti continues to campaign for restoration of his right to have rights within his
country of birth.