Citizenship and Development: Palestinians in France and the Multiple Meanings of Statelessness Nell Gabiam 1 Published online: 14 September 2015 # Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015 Abstract In this paper, I analyze the recent efforts by UNHCR (office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees) to combat statelessness by drawing on fieldwork conducted in summer 2012 among Palestinians of various ages, genders, and legal statuses living in France. By privileging my Palestinian informants’ own understanding of what it means to be stateless, I question some of the assumptions that inform UNHCR’ s discourse on statelessness. I show that, while they echoed some of UNHCR’ s views on statelessness, several of my Palestinian interlocutors diverged from these views in that they expressed skepticism about the state’ s emancipatory potential. At a broader level, I show that the official categories associated with statelessness and that are used by UNHCR in its effort to end statelessness do not fully capture the predicament of Palestinians in the twenty-first century. Keywords Palestinians . Statelessness . Citizenship . Identity . Development Introduction As we sat in a Parisian café in June 2012, Hosam, a Palestinian in his 50s who had spent most of his life in the Palestinian refugee camp of Yarmouk in Syria, recounted the following story: He had received political asylum in Canada in the late 1990s after having been incarcerated in a Syrian jail for his involvement with the Syrian opposi- tion. After 5 years in Canada, he was able to return to Syria. He was carrying both his Canadian and Syrian refugee travel documents with him during his return trip. He would need his Syrian travel document in order to re-enter Syria, so he chose to use it during his trip. He had a layover in the Netherlands, and since he had a significant amount of time before his next flight, he decided to get a transit visa to visit a friend in Amsterdam. Hosam presented his Syrian travel document at the transit desk, but the St Comp Int Dev (2015) 50:479–499 DOI 10.1007/s12116-015-9196-0 * Nell Gabiam ngabiam@iastate.edu 1 Departments of Anthropology and Political Science, Iowa State University, Ames, IA, USA