The world is divided into about 195 countries — depending on who you ask, since the count itself is contested — and the convention of post-1945 international politics has been that every patch of land belongs to one of them. But the boundaries of these states do not match the boundaries of the world's peoples. A Kurd in eastern Turkey, a Tibetan in western China, a Sahrawi in the Algerian desert, a Palestinian in Lebanon — each belongs to a people with a shared language, a continuous history, often a flag, sometimes a government-in-exile, and no country of their own.
The umbrella term political scientists use for this situation is "stateless nation," and it covers a striking variety of communities, from 30 million Kurds spread across four countries to a few thousand-strong indigenous peoples whose claims are pressed by NGOs rather than by their members directly. The category is more elastic than it sounds, and the politics around any specific case are almost always more complicated than a single summary can convey. What follows is the shape of the concept, with the major examples treated individually rather than as variations on a template.
The Concept
"Nation" in political vocabulary is not the same thing as "state." A state is a sovereign political entity with recognised borders, a government, and (usually) a seat at the United Nations. A nation is a community of people who consider themselves linked — by language, history, religion, ethnicity, descent, or some combination — and who share a sense of common political destiny. The two concepts overlap frequently: France is a state inhabited mainly by people who identify as French, and the French state is the political vehicle of the French nation. But the overlap is not necessary. A state can contain multiple nations (Belgium, Bolivia, India). A nation can be spread across multiple states and possess none of them as its political vehicle. The latter is what makes a nation "stateless."
The political theorist Ernest Gellner argued in the 1980s that the modern world tends to push toward one-nation-per-state, with nationalism as the ideology that powers the convergence. The 20th century saw a great deal of effort, peaceful and otherwise, devoted to that convergence: the breakup of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires after the First World War produced new states intended to match nations (Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, the Baltic states, the Arab successor states). The breakup of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia in the early 1990s did the same thing again. Each of those waves left behind a residue of peoples whose claims to statehood were not accepted at the negotiating table — and those residues are roughly what "stateless nations" refers to today.
The Kurds
The Kurdish people are the standard example of a stateless nation. There are roughly 25-35 million Kurds, distributed across southeastern Turkey, northern Iraq, northwestern Iran, and northern Syria — a contiguous mountain-and-plateau region historically called Kurdistan that has no political status in any of the four countries that contain it. The Kurds speak related languages of the Iranian branch of Indo-European (Kurmanji, Sorani, and several smaller dialects), share elements of religion (most are Sunni Muslims, with significant Alevi, Yazidi, and Christian minorities), and have a continuous historical identity going back at least to the Saladin period of the 12th century.
The 1920 Treaty of Sèvres, drafted after the Allied victory over the Ottoman Empire in the First World War, included provisions for a Kurdish state in eastern Anatolia. The treaty was never ratified. The 1923 Treaty of Lausanne that replaced it abandoned the Kurdish provisions entirely, and the new Turkish republic took over the territory and spent the next several decades suppressing Kurdish language, dress, and political organisation. Kurdish armed movements have operated in all four countries at different times — most prominently the PKK in Turkey since 1984, the KDP and PUK in Iraq since the 1960s, and various Iranian Kurdish groups including the KDPI and Komala. The Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq, established after the 1991 Gulf War and formalised in the 2005 Iraqi constitution, is the closest thing to a Kurdish state but is constitutionally a part of Iraq rather than an independent country. A 2017 independence referendum in Iraqi Kurdistan voted 93 percent in favour of independence; the result was ignored by Baghdad and rejected by Turkey, Iran, the US, and the UN.
Tibetans
Tibet was an effectively independent state from 1913 to 1950, when the People's Republic of China invaded and annexed the region. The Dalai Lama fled to Dharamsala, India in 1959 after a failed uprising, and the Tibetan government-in-exile has operated from there ever since. Inside China, Tibet is administratively the Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR), with significant Tibetan populations also in Qinghai, Sichuan, Gansu, and Yunnan provinces. The Chinese government rejects the idea that Tibet was ever an independent state in the modern sense and treats Tibetan separatism as a security issue rather than a political one.
The Tibetan case is unusual among stateless nations for the prominence of its leadership in exile, the deep involvement of religion (Tibetan Buddhism's institutional structure has continued to operate from India), and the unusually broad sympathy the cause has attracted in the West without producing any meaningful state recognition of Tibetan independence claims. No country in the world currently recognises Tibet as a separate state. The Tibetan government-in-exile is recognised by no government but is treated as a legitimate interlocutor by some, including the Indian state that hosts it.
Palestinians
The Palestinian case is the most internationally prominent contemporary example and is in some ways the hardest to categorise. About 5 million Palestinians live in the West Bank and Gaza Strip, areas of historic Palestine that came under Israeli control in the 1967 Six-Day War. About 1.6 million Palestinian citizens of Israel live within Israel's pre-1967 borders. Another 6-7 million Palestinians live in diaspora, primarily in Jordan, Syria, Lebanon, and the Gulf states. The State of Palestine, declared by the PLO in 1988 and reorganised under the Palestinian Authority after the Oslo Accords of the 1990s, has been recognised by 146 of the UN's 193 member states. It has observer status at the UN. It does not, however, control its own borders, airspace, or maritime access, and the question of what its final territorial extent should be is the central unresolved issue of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Whether Palestine should be called a stateless nation, a partially recognised state, or a state under occupation depends on whose definitions are used. International law treatments tend toward the second framing; popular usage tends toward the first.
The Sahrawi People of Western Sahara
Western Sahara is a 266,000 km² stretch of desert on the Atlantic coast of northwest Africa, formerly the Spanish colony of Spanish Sahara. When Spain withdrew in 1975, Morocco and Mauritania moved in and divided the territory. Mauritania withdrew in 1979. Morocco has controlled approximately 80 percent of the territory ever since, separated from the remaining 20 percent — controlled by the Polisario Front, a Sahrawi independence movement — by a 2,700-kilometre sand berm running roughly north-south through the desert.
The Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic, declared by Polisario in 1976, is recognised by about 40 UN member states and by the African Union (where it has been a full member since 2017). Morocco rejects the declaration. The status of Western Sahara has been listed by the UN as a "non-self-governing territory" since the 1960s — the same legal category once used for European colonies — and a referendum on self-determination has been formally pending since 1991. It has not been held. The Sahrawi population is divided between Moroccan-controlled Western Sahara (around 600,000 people, including a large number of Moroccan settlers), Polisario-controlled "Free Zone" (a few thousand nomads), and the Tindouf refugee camps in southwestern Algeria (around 175,000 people), where most of the Sahrawi diaspora has lived in tent-and-cinder-block settlements for 50 years.
The Roma
The Roma (sometimes called Romani) are an unusual case among stateless nations in that they have never had a state and have generally not sought one in the way Kurds or Sahrawis have. The Roma are an ethnolinguistic group with origins in northern India, who migrated westward through the Middle East and into Europe over the 11th to 15th centuries. There are roughly 10-12 million Roma in Europe today, with the largest populations in Romania, Bulgaria, Spain, Hungary, Slovakia, and France. They speak the Romani language (with regional dialects) along with the languages of the countries they live in, and share elements of religion, custom, and law that crossed Europe with them.
The Roma case has reshaped the meaning of "stateless nation" because Roma political organisation since the 1970s has explicitly rejected the idea of a Roma state in favour of pan-European recognition of Roma rights within the existing nation-states. The 1971 World Romani Congress adopted the Roma flag and anthem but explicitly framed the movement as one of "non-territorial nation" — a category that some political scientists have begun to take more seriously since.
What Recognition Does and Does Not Buy
The political logic of statehood is that recognition by other states transforms a community into an entity with rights and powers under international law: the ability to make treaties, control immigration, raise taxes, conduct foreign policy, defend territory. Stateless nations lack those formal tools, which is why their political advocacy tends to focus either on full statehood (Kurds, Palestinians, Sahrawis) or on subnational autonomy arrangements that grant some state-like powers without crossing the threshold of full sovereignty (Catalans, Scots, Quebeckers — though those last three are usually treated as a different category because the host states are democracies with constitutional mechanisms for their accommodation).
The reasons states resist recognising stateless nations are usually some combination of territorial interest (the host state would lose territory), security concern (a new state on a border is unpredictable), domino effect (recognising one separatist claim might encourage others within the recognising state's own borders), and great-power politics (recognition is often a function of which patrons a movement has). The Kurds suffer in part from the fact that all four host states have powerful regional allies opposed to Kurdish statehood. The Sahrawi suffer in part from the fact that Morocco is a US and French ally. Tibetans suffer in part from the fact that China is China.
The Cases That Don't Fit
Several groups commonly described as "stateless nations" actually fit the category awkwardly. The Catalans, Scots, and Quebeckers are nations within democratic states that already permit substantial cultural and political autonomy and (in the case of Scotland and Quebec) constitutional mechanisms for considering independence by referendum. Their statelessness is contingent and procedural rather than fundamental, and most of their advocates speak in the language of self-determination within an existing legal order rather than national liberation from outside one.
The Uyghurs of Xinjiang are sometimes described as a stateless nation, but the Uyghur political movement has historically aimed at independence (the short-lived East Turkestan Republic of 1933 and 1944-49) rather than recognition within China, and the Chinese state's mass internment programme since 2017 has effectively suppressed organised Uyghur political activity inside the country. The Uyghur diaspora maintains a government-in-exile and advocacy organisations but lacks the consolidated leadership structure that the Tibetan or Sahrawi movements have.
Indigenous peoples — the Maori in New Zealand, the various First Nations in Canada and the US, the Sami in northern Scandinavia, the Aboriginal Australians, the dozens of named groups in the Amazon basin — are not usually called stateless nations because their political claims are usually framed in terms of indigenous sovereignty within the host state rather than full international statehood. The 2007 UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples gives them a separate legal vocabulary that the stateless-nation framework does not.
Where This Leaves Things
The number of recognised states in the world has grown from about 50 at the founding of the United Nations in 1945 to nearly 200 today, mostly through the decolonisation processes of the 1950s and 60s and the breakups of the communist federations in the 1990s. The growth has slowed sharply since 2000. South Sudan in 2011 was the most recent new full UN member. Kosovo, declared in 2008 and recognised by about 100 states, has been blocked from UN membership by Russia and China. The other major candidates for statehood — Kurds, Palestinians, Sahrawis, Tibetans, Taiwanese (which is a different and more complicated case), Somalilanders — have not crossed the threshold of full recognition in over a decade.
The system, in other words, is in a steady state where the existing roster of states resists adding new members and the existing stateless nations have not been able to muster the coalition of recognitions required to break through. Whether the next round of breakups will come from the further fragmentation of multinational states (Russia, China, India), from the diplomatic completion of long-running independence processes (the Sahrawi, Kosovo), or from situations not currently on the radar, is the kind of question that the next half-century of geopolitics will answer. In the meantime, several tens of millions of people will continue to belong to nations whose names appear on no border crossings.