Short answers, pulled from the story.
A stateless person is someone "not considered as a national by any state under the operation of its law", a definition established by the 1954 UN Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons. The status ultimately depends on the viewpoint of individual states toward a person or group, and it can result from conflicting nationality laws, state succession, administrative barriers, or deliberate government action.
At the end of 2022, UNHCR estimated 4.4 million people worldwide as either stateless or of undetermined nationality, an increase of roughly 90,800 from the end of 2021. That figure is incomplete because UNHCR lacks data from at least 22 countries with mass statelessness, and it excludes de facto stateless people with no legal identity documents; the World Bank estimates at least 850 million people fit that broader category.
The main causes include conflicting nationality laws at birth, particularly clashes between jus soli and jus sanguinis systems; gender discrimination in nationality laws, with women in 24 countries legally barred from transmitting citizenship to their children as of 2022; state succession events such as the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991; and administrative obstacles including missing birth registration, excessive documentation fees, and unrealistic procedural deadlines.
The UN adopted the Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons in 1954, which provided the first international definition of a stateless person and outlined protective rights. Seven years later, in 1961, the UN adopted the Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness, which entered into force on the 13th of December 1975 and sets standards on nationality acquisition, renunciation, and deprivation. As of September 2015, the 1954 convention had 86 state parties.
The Bedoon are a mostly tribal stateless population in Kuwait, largely from the Al-Muntafiq tribal confederation, who were treated as citizens from 1965 to 1985 and made up 80-90% of the Kuwaiti Army in the 1970s and 1980s. In 1985, the government reclassified them as illegal residents during the Iran-Iraq War, and by 1986 they were fully excluded from social and economic rights. A 1995 Human Rights Watch report described the treatment as "a policy of denationalization" amounting to an apartheid-like existence.
A stateless nation is an ethnic group or nation that does not possess its own sovereign state. The term was coined in 1983 by political scientist Jacques Leruez in his book L'Écosse, une nation sans État, about Scotland's position within the British state. A prominent contemporary example is the Kurdish population, estimated at 30-45 million people, which has no recognized sovereign state.