Statelessness, precarity, and labour market agency: lived realities of the Dom minority in Lebanon

This article investigates the labour market agency of Lebanese Dom through an intersectional capability lens. Employing mixed methods, it draws on a household survey of 112 Lebanese Dom households, followed by qualitative interviews to examine the systemic barriers constraining access to the formal labour market. While some Dom hold Lebanese citizenship, others remain stateless, their liminal legal status, registered as neither citizens nor refugees, perpetuating their exclusion from the formal labour market. The voices of the stateless and research from the Global South are underrepresented in the literature, despite the fact that the largest stateless populations reside there. The literature on statelessness has also disproportionately focused on its legal aspects, whereas research on the Dom community remains sparse. This article seeks to fill this gap, illustrating how systemic discrimination diminishes the real opportunities available to intersectionally marginalized groups like the Dom in the labour market.