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Statelessness (Flag of Stateless Nations)

To create Statelessness (The Flag of Stateless Nations) I collected all the flags of all stateless nations around the world. Subsequently I used Artificial Intelligence algorithm to fuse all these flags into one flag representing all stateless nations, since all early humans were stateless.

Contrary to popular belief, only 3 percent of the world's national groups have associated nation-states and possess the status of being a recognized independent nation (statehood). The overwhelming majority of nations in the world are stateless nations distributed in one or more states. While there are over 3000 estimated nations in the world, there are only 193 member states of the United Nations, of which fewer than 20 are considered to be ethnically homogeneous nation-states.

In a historical sense, statelessness could be considered to be the default human condition that existed universally from the evolution of human species to the emergence of the first human civilizations. A stateless nation is an ethnic group or nation that does not possess its own state and is not the majority population in any nation state. Members of stateless nations may be citizens of the country in which they live, or they may be denied citizenship or residency by that country. Some of the stateless nations historically had a state, which was absorbed by another state (e.g. Tibet), some were always a stateless nation, dominated by another nation. Other stateless nations are residents of occupied territories where statehood never emerged in the first place, has ceased to exist (for example the Polish state ceased to exist at the end of the 18th century having been partitioned by neighboring empires and was erased from the political map of Europe until 1918) or is largely unrecognized.

Stateless nations either are dispersed across a number of states (for example, the Yoruba people are found in the African states of Nigeria, Benin and Togo), or form the native population of a province within a larger state (such as the Uyghur people in China). Stateless nations can have large populations; for example, the Kurds have an estimated population of over 20 million people dispersed throughout Syria, Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Armenia, and Azerbaijan. Other large stateless nations include the Roma (a population of over 12 million people which originated in India and subsequently migrated to Europe, Middle East, the Caucasus region, and North and South Americas) or the Rohingya (a group 3.5 millions of Muslims of South Asian descent that populate western Myanmar and Bangladesh). Other major stateless nation are the Palestinians, over 5 million of whom are mostly dispersed between Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. Palestinians are currently a stateless nation, although the sovereignty of Palestine has been recognized by 135 member countries of the U.N. Some ethnic groups were once a stateless nation that later became a nation state (for example, the nations of the Balkans such as the Croats, Serbs, Bosniaks, Slovenes, Montenegrins and Macedonians were once part of a multinational state of Yugoslavia; the Jews were a stateless nation until 1948 when they declared Israel a state).

Stateless nations are unprotected in many countries and as a result, they are vulnerable to serious human rights abuses: they became victims of atrocities such as discrimination, ethnic cleansing, genocide, forced assimilation, as well as exploitation of labor and natural resources.

The symbiotic relationship between nations and states (forming nation-states) arose in early modern Western Europe (18th century) and it was exported to the rest of the world through colonial rule. During the imperial and colonial era, powerful nations extended their influence outside their homeland, and this resulted in many colonized nations ceasing to be self-governing and have since been described as stateless nations. Even today, the colonial boundaries form modern national boundaries, which often differ from cultural boundaries. This results in situations in which people who speak the same language or people who have the same culture are divided by national borders, for example, New Guinea is split into the regions of West Papua (a former Dutch colony) and Papua New Guinea (a former British colony).

Throughout history, numerous nations declared their independence, but not all succeeded in establishing a state. The claim of the stateless nations to self-determination is often denied due to geopolitical interests and increasing globalization of the world. Many stateless nations show solidarity with other stateless nations.

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