Working together with stateless communities for change: developing guidelines for meaningful, collaborative advocacy on statelessness

The process of co-developing Advocacy Guidelines 

The Advocacy Guidelines, which will be published in the coming months, were born from a series of conversations within our community group. ENS’s community group is a group of 50+ stateless activists and changemakers who meet monthly to network, share ideas and co-design projects and resources. Such resources include our Community Speaker Policy and Storytelling Guidelines, which our Advocacy Guidelines are building on. These conversations identified that stateless people are often absent from advocacy spaces, and that our community group wants to know how to engage in meaningful advocacy for positive change.  

Questions that were raised included:  

• What does the advocacy process look like?  

• What kind of change can be achieved and how?  

• Which institutions should we target?  

• How can allies and institutions make advocacy spaces more accessible and involve those with lived experience in a meaningful way?  

Ahead of the 2023 Global Refugee Forum, ENS initiated a joint pledge to explore these questions and develop guidelines for collaborative advocacy on statelessness, inviting Statefree and Apatride Network to join in co-submitting this. Following this, we have proceeded to collaboratively draft and develop the Guidelines. 

The Guidelines seek to empower stateless communities to engage in meaningful, collaborative advocacy, and educate allies and institutions on how to break down barriers for stateless campaigners. The goal is to enhance participation and collaboration, in turn leading to positive reform and systemic change driven and led by campaigners with lived experience of statelessness and representatives of impacted communities. 

In 2025, we held consultations on the first draft with ENS’s Advisory Committee and participants at our joint conference with Statefree in Berlin in November. Our Advisory Committee gave suggestions on how to make the guidelines more accessible, including adding simple visuals and diagrams, and condensing the information into different formats for different communities and audiences. They reflected on some of the challenges inherent in campaigning in this space, and how the Guidelines could share case studies not only of what has worked, but what hasn’t. 

In Berlin, we heard first from two of our community members who are active in advocacy spaces. Elvis Beriša shared his experience of campaigning for Roma communities in Montenegro, and the highs and lows he has faced. Sirazul Islam spoke about the role of institutions and allies, the progress made over the past ten years, and how we need to keep building on this momentum. The group explored ways in which we can bring the Guidelines to life with more examples from our members, community and wider network, and shared ideas for developing training sessions out of the resource, ideally led by community members themselves. We also reflected on barriers to participation and how NGOs and allies can help break these down. 

Policymakers don’t just open their doors to people they don’t know, even when training has been provided and that person is upskilled. Allies and institutions need to help break down barriers." - ENS member  

Following Berlin, we developed an updated draft to share with attendees of December’s RNL to prompt further discussion and feedback. 

The Regional Network Lab: ‘Towards collaborative, cross-sector advocacy on statelessness’ 

Over the course of the Regional Network Lab, which I facilitated, we first heard from Marin Roman, Senior Statelessness Officer at UNHCR and Coordinator of the Global Alliance to End Statelessness Secretariat, who welcomed us to the workshop and explained the work of the Global Alliance. 

Patricia Low, Research and Policy Coordinator at Family Frontiers, shared her personal experience as a mother who couldn’t pass on her Malaysian citizenship to her children due to gender-discriminatory nationality laws. She talked about the advocacy she has carried out in Malaysia, guided us through Family Frontier’s multi-pronged approach, and reflected on the importance of arts and creativity in campaigning, finishing powerfully with a poem she had written and performed on her experiences. 

Creative expression can move people in ways facts cannot, softening ‘hard hearts.’

We also heard from Aleksandra Semeriak Gavrilenok, Statefree’s Programme Manager (and ENS’s Vice Chair among other roles) who explored what allies and institutions can do to better support stateless campaigners. She explained how stateless campaigners start from a disadvantaged position for various reasons, and that institutions create further barriers to participation in advocacy including tokenism, lack of transparency, and practical barriers such as lack of remuneration or language barriers. She shared how some of these issues can be better addressed by institutions and allies. 

The system expects stateless persons to adapt to the system.

Following these presentations and after giving an overview of the history, process and contents of the draft Guidelines, we split into four break-out sessions to discuss:  

• Centering mental health in advocacy work  

• Co-designing a journey to collective advocacy 

• How can institutions and allies better support stateless people? 

• Making the guidelines more accessible 

To finish, we shared reflections from participants and committed to incorporating new ideas and suggestions into the next draft of the Guidelines. 

Identifying and breaking down barriers  

Common themes emerged from the RNL break-out sessions, including mental wellbeing, centering lived experience, intersectionality, the role of creativity in advocacy, and avoiding jargon and technical terms. Some of these are barriers to participation in advocacy, while others are opportunities to break through these barriers. The guidelines seek to provide tools to help stateless campaigners, allies and institutions to get past these obstacles and meaningfully participate in collective statelessness advocacy. 

Barriers which prevent stateless communities and individuals from engaging in advocacy may include lack of remuneration or ability to access funds; literacy and language divides (even where policymakers and stateless communities speak the same language, institutional language can be challenging to understand); or lack of support for or understanding of mental health and trauma. 

Some key reflections and recommendations from participants on how allies and institutions can better support stateless campaigners include: organisations must be intentional about wellbeing, mental health and self-care, and embed trauma-informed approaches in their work; they must move beyond tokenism and see stateless campaigners as key leaders and partners in their campaign, not as a box-ticking exercise; and they must try to avoid technical language or jargon. 

Participants also reflected on other ways stateless campaigners can participate meaningfully in advocacy, including employing non-traditional, creative methods such as film, poetry and art to reach wider audiences; mainstreaming statelessness awareness across work to address intersecting forms of oppression and on different policy issues; and finding resilience in community, shared history and collective action. 

One thing which has really shone out for me recently, both in this Regional Network Lab but also at our joint Berlin conference and in our monthly community meetings, is the importance of arts and creativity as an advocacy tool. A powerful poem or piece of music or film can be the key thing that people remember from an advocacy event, resonating in different ways for different people. This can be healing for the person who creates it; can cut across jargon and barriers; and can really set the tone for discussions and debate. I look forward to embedding a creative approach more concretely in the guidelines. 

Next steps 

Now, we will work together to incorporate ideas and reflections collected so far into an updated draft of the Guidelines. The guidelines will then be designed with accessibility in mind, published and disseminated to communities and individuals with lived experience, allies and organisations working on statelessness, and relevant institutions. We are keen to find innovative ways to ensure that the guidelines get in front of those who need to see them. 

I am very grateful to the expertise of Bina, Patricia and Shuchi at Family Frontiers, Jessica at Apatride Network, Aleksandra and Margarida at Statefree, our former Community Engagement Coordinator Sirazul Islam, and all who have attended workshops, shared ideas and supported the development of these Guidelines. We are also grateful to all our partners and donors who support our community engagement work which is integral to everything we do as a Network. It has been a collaborative, global effort, and we very much look forward to sharing the finalised Guidelines in due course. 

Watch this space!