Ahmad Jaber

Ahmad Jaber, alias Ahmad Benswait, is a stateless researcher in the United Kingdom. He is originally from a minority indigenous to the lands of Kuwait but excluded from the right to Kuwaiti nationality since the country’s independence from Britain. Benswait’s research is informed by his lived experiences of statelessness, including being arbitrarily classed ‘illegal (Bidoon) resident’ in what has always been his homeland, the deprivation of basic human rights and forced migration.

Benedikt Buechel

Before starting a Ph.D. in Political Theory at the University of Edinburgh, I took an M.A. in International Studies at Seoul National University, and a B.A. in Philosophy and Business Studies at the University of Mannheim. In 2012, I was an exchange student at the Kyoto University of Foreign Studies. Since 2019, I've been a co-chair of the “Normative Theory of Immigration Working Group” which is an international collective of scholars working at the intersections of migration studies, policy studies, and political theory. Moreover,

Benedikt Buechel website

Cecilia Manzotti

Cecilia Manzotti is a PhD researcher at the School of Law, Politics and Sociology of the University of Sussex. Her research focuses on the determination of the nationality status of asylum seekers and refugees, including their possible statelessness, in Europe. Previously, she worked in refugee status determination, first as a legal advisor with Africa and Middle Refugee Assistance (AMERA) in Cairo, and later as a decision-maker with UNHCR in Egypt, Turkey and Italy. Cecilia also worked in wider refugee protection, and more recently served as a consultant with UNHCR in Guinea, focusing on statelessness. Moreover, she conducted research on migrant smuggling and trafficking in persons with UNODC and contributed to UNODC publications on these topics.

Dr Eleanor Cotterill

I am a Human Geographer based in the School of Geography and Planning at Cardiff University. Working directly with stateless individuals, my research aims to understand everyday experiences of statelessness; thinking beyond the status as a legal conundrum and conceptualising statelessness as a complex political, social, and cultural status rooted in the geographical everyday. My research reveals the routine social injustices stateless communities encounter, including access to legal services, healthcare and education, the consequences of these injustices (mental health) and how individuals endure this situation in the UK.

I am also interested in the design and practice of creative research methods to conduct ethnographic research, exploring how creative, participatory research methodologies can be ethically utilised with vulnerable populations. My current research utilises and examines scrapbooking as a form of slow elicitation with stateless individuals.

Dr Eleanor Cotterill website

Liverpool University Law Clinic

The Liverpool Law Clinic is part of the School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool. The Clinic provides a free legal service. Third year law students work on immigration and asylum cases, including the cases of stateless people, under the extremely close supervision of qualified lawyers who are specialists in the field. Staff at the Law Clinic started this work in 2013 and now contribute to policy initiatives at national and international level.

Liverpool University Law Clinic website