The Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs and the Yale Department of History will host the next installment of its Spring 2026 Lecture Series on Statelessness in the Modern World with Ria Kapoor, senior lecturer in international and global history at Queen Mary University of London.

This talk will explore how contradictions of status in the Commonwealth and at the international level left loopholes that states remaking and consolidating their identities could exploit, all within the bounds of law. Centering the departure of Ugandan Asians in the days after Idi Amin issued the expulsion order in 1972, this session will demonstrate how long-standing debates about citizenship (or lack thereof) were suddenly subject to ad-hoc decisions forced in such a speedy departure. Yet these rapidly made interventions transformed debates and understandings of who responsible for long-term residents in Uganda – Uganda? The British empire-turned–commonwealth? India or Pakistan? The UN or a humanitarian member of the international community? Further, were they citizens, stateless, refugees or something else entirely? Notably, these gaps left room for individuals, families, and community networks to manipulate these statuses in pursuit of their rights, demonstrating how, in some cases,  the dispossession of statelessness had more power than citizenship in securing their rights in the aftermath of empire in East Africa. 

Ria Kapoor is a historian of refugees, immigration, and rights, with a focus on the Afro-Asian world and its impact on the international and global orders. She joined QMUL in 2022, following a year as a Simon Fellow at the University of Manchester. She completed a D.Phil in history at the University of Oxford in 2019, following a master's in international history at the Geneva Graduate Institute and an undergraduate degree from St. Stephen's College of the University of Delhi.