When Jamie Chai Yun Liew was a little girl, she often heard ghost stories.

"One of the most memorable stories told to me was of a woman ghost known as Pontianak … My auntie, visiting from southeast Southeast Asia, was shocked to find a small banana tree in our bay window in the kitchen of my childhood home," she writes.

"She warned me that Pontianak likes to live in banana trees, and that she is a vengeful spirit that can inflict bad luck on those around her. I never looked at that plant the same way again."

The story of Pontianak returned to haunt Liew as an adult. She is now a lawyer and professor at the University of Ottawa. On a research trip to study statelessness in Malaysia, she kept hearing stories about ghost sightings.

"The superstitious side of me held a respect for the warnings and stories, but the scholar in me also started to see a parallel between the lived experiences of stateless persons and Pontianak," Liew writes in her new book Ghost Citizens: Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law.

"I began to believe again, like I did as a child, that ghosts, the living dead, were among us."

Liew spoke with IDEAS host Nahlah Ayed about her research on "ghost citizens," how her own father's history of statelessness shapes her work, and how statelessness can prompt new thinking around community, citizenship and belonging.

Here is an excerpt from their conversation. For the full discussion, listen and follow the IDEAS podcast, on your favourite podcast player.

I'll start from the very global idea that there are millions of stateless people in the world, and that the concept of statelessness really refers to a person who does not have citizenship to any country whatsoever.

Ghost citizens are a smaller subset of that larger group of stateless people, people who believe that they are citizens of a country that they are living in, that have long-standing, deep, genuine ties to that country — whether it's through their family living there for many generations, whether it's because they have children or parents who are born there, whether it's because they have employment [or] community support. All kinds of different links that anchor them to the place that they consider home.

But for whatever reason, the state that they're within does not recognize them as a citizen, or it's denying them the legal proof or evidence or a document that substantiates this fact.

Ghost citizens are ghost citizens in two ways. The first is that they are being ghosted. A lot of young people might relate to this in the dating world, when someone doesn't return your calls or texts. The state is simply not responding to people's applications for citizenship or claims that they are citizens.

The other way in which I think of the term ghost citizen is the ways in which the legal systems have made people foreigners in their own countries.They could be going to a government counter or registrar to apply for citizenship, and people are saying, "you know, you don't look like you're Canadian," or "you don't look like you're Malaysian," and they're conferring ghost citizenship on them. Like, "you look like you're from this country. And we're going to find you legally as a citizen of another country." For example, the Philippines, Thailand, China … People might not actually be citizens of other countries. And yet the courts are making speculative findings based on no evidence whatsoever.

Then the third thread that I pulled through my research is just the experience of being stateless. For some people, it does feel like a ghost-like experience, like they're in purgatory, that they've experienced administrative death and that they're living their lives in limbo, waiting for something to change so that they can begin living again.

I think it is more common than people might realize. There is a very famous case that involves an individual named Deepan Budlakoti. He is, by normal conceptions of citizenship, a Canadian. He was born on Canadian soil. But he got in trouble with the law. It caught the attention of the Canada Border Services Agency.

They reviewed his citizenship status and claimed that his parents were diplomats at the time that he was born. And Canadian citizenship law prohibits or excludes people who were born under diplomatic status in Canada from obtaining Canadian citizenship.

His parents were, in fact, domestics or, from what I understand, cleaners for a diplomat. So the diplomatic status is quite tenuous to begin with. But the timing of it is also very uncertain. However our legal system did take it as fact that they were diplomats and as a result, he was deemed stateless.

[Canada] also commented that he had the opportunity to obtain citizenship in India by virtue of his parents' home country, Of note in this case is that the Canadian government and the courts were aware that the Indian government was contacted. They confirmed he was not a citizen of India and that they had no claim over him. And despite this, Canada still deemed Deepan not a Canadian citizen. He still lives in Canada today in limbo, without any citizenship whatsoever.

For me, as a lawyer and a legal scholar, I found this extremely troubling. Many of us understand that there are burdens and standards of proof in the legal system meant to protect people… There's entire courses in law schools surrounding what kinds of evidence can be proffered.

And yet, in this kind of setting, in citizenship applications or in immigration proceedings, the courts are really playing fast and loose with the evidence rules. In many of the cases that I've studied, there is nothing but mere speculation.

Completely. It is life changing. It renders someone without a home. You are legally made homeless, through this speculative finding.