This paper argues that the question of membership, non-membership and statelessness poses a radical challenge for liberal political theory as such – it is not a marginal issue, such that it can be dealt with so that we can carry on with business as usual. Instead, liberal theory cannot address the membership question without addressing itself, and cannot answer it without radically transforming itself. Rather than being marginal figures in liberal political theory, the stateless compel us to question its very foundations and imagine a new vision of a global political community, a post-national world made up of transnational belonging. This chapter subjects theory to theoretical scrutiny, exposing the way in which the majority of theory has been constructed from an ‘insider’ perspective, posing the stateless as the problem that needs solving from the citizen’s point of view.
