Fridtjof Nansen's creation of the world's first international travel document for stateless refugees in 1922 established principles that directly shaped the 1951 UN Refugee Convention and continue to inspire contemporary digital identity initiatives serving over 1 million people today. Yet this legacy reveals a profound tension: while Nansen's humanitarian vision of enabling refugee mobility through portable identity remains urgently relevant for 123 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, modern attempts to recreate such solutions face complex challenges around privacy, governance, and political will that were absent—or deliberately ignored—in the original system. The story begins with a Norwegian polar explorer who became history's most innovative humanitarian, transitions through his passport system that saved 450,000 stateless Russians and Armenians while embodying troubling compromises with state power, and culminates in today's blockchain-based identity projects that promise empowerment but risk perpetuating the same patterns of control and exclusion that limited the original Nansen passport's transformative potential.
Fridtjof Nansen defied categorization throughout his remarkable 68 years. Born October 10, 1861, in Christiania (now Oslo), he first achieved fame as a polar explorer whose revolutionary approaches reshaped Arctic exploration. His 1888 Greenland crossing introduced the radical strategy of starting from the uninhabited east coast, eliminating any retreat option—a gambit that succeeded spectacularly and established his reputation for calculated risk-taking. The subsequent Fram expedition (1893-1896) demonstrated even greater audacity: Nansen designed a ship with a rounded hull specifically to be lifted by ice pressure rather than crushed, then deliberately sailed into the polar ice pack off Siberia to drift toward the North Pole. When the drift proved too slow, he and companion Hjalmar Johansen left the ship and skied toward the pole, reaching 86°14′N—a record that stood for years—before wintering at Franz Josef Land and miraculously encountering British explorer Frederick Jackson in June 1896.
Yet Nansen's scientific contributions extended far beyond exploration. His 1888 doctoral dissertation on nervous system structure defended neuron theory years before Santiago Ramón y Cajal won the 1906 Nobel Prize in Medicine for related work, representing what biographers call a paradigm shift in neuroscience. He later invented the "Nansen bottle" for deep water sampling, a device still used into the 21st century, and worked with Walfrid Ekman to develop principles underlying the "Ekman spiral" in oceanography. This combination of rigorous scientific method, innovative thinking, and willingness to stake everything on untested theories would later characterize his humanitarian work.
The transition from polar exploration to humanitarian advocacy began after Norway's 1905 independence from Sweden, when Nansen served as the new nation's first Minister to London (1906-1908), negotiating the Integrity Treaty that guaranteed Norwegian sovereignty. World War I's aftermath, however, presented challenges that drew Nansen into his final and perhaps most impactful career. In spring 1920, the League of Nations appointed him High Commissioner for Prisoners of War, tasking him with repatriating soldiers stranded across Europe after the war's end. Working with minimal resources—an initial budget of just £4,000—Nansen organized the return of approximately 427,886 prisoners from 26-30 countries within two years, primarily using chartered German ships under peace treaty terms and the Baltic shipping route. This success demonstrated his talent for pragmatic problem-solving under severe constraints, a skill that would prove essential for his next challenge.
The Russian Revolution and subsequent civil war created a humanitarian catastrophe of unprecedented scale. By 1921, approximately 9.5 million displaced people struggled across Europe, many rendered stateless when the Soviet government's December 15, 1921 decree revoked citizenship of all Russians who had left the country. This single administrative act created 800,000 to 1,000,000 stateless refugees overnight—people who suddenly possessed no legal existence in the international system. They could not work legally, travel, open bank accounts, marry, or access basic services. Countries feared accepting them would create permanent burdens, while the Soviet Union refused to take them back. Simultaneously, the Russian famine of 1921-1923 threatened an estimated 30-35 million people with starvation.
Nansen threw himself into both crises with characteristic intensity. As High Commissioner for Russian Refugees (appointed August 1921, later expanded to all refugees by 1923), he organized famine relief that worked with 48 charitable organizations despite most nations refusing to recognize the USSR. Estimates suggest this intervention saved 7-22 million lives. He negotiated with the Soviet government to establish model farms, introducing the first tractors to Soviet agriculture, and earned honorary membership in the Moscow Soviet. For the stateless refugees, he conceived an audacious solution: if nations would not grant citizenship, perhaps they would recognize an international travel document issued by a supranational authority.
The Intergovernmental Conference on Identity Certificates for Russian Refugees convened July 3-5, 1922 in Geneva, following Nansen's March 1922 proposal to the League of Nations Council. The resulting document—officially titled "Stateless Persons Passport" but quickly known as the "Nansen Passport" after its promoter—established revolutionary principles that would echo through the next century. The passport featured the holder's identity, nationality (listed as "stateless"), and cost five gold francs with annual renewal required. Crucially, it allowed refugees to cross borders to find work, provided protection from deportation, and from 1926 onward, guaranteed the right to return to the issuing country.
The system's rapid adoption proved remarkable. By 1923, 39 governments recognized the Nansen passport; by 1942, that number reached 52 countries. Between 1922 and the system's discontinuation in 1942, approximately 450,000 Nansen passports were issued, enabling stateless Russians and Armenians (added in 1924) to travel for work, education, and family reunification. The passport's holders represented a who's-who of 20th century cultural figures: composer Igor Stravinsky used it to travel with the Ballets Russes; writer Vladimir Nabokov crossed Europe on the "sickly green" document he described in his memoir "Speak, Memory"; prima ballerina Anna Pavlova performed internationally; artist Marc Chagall fled to Paris; composer Sergei Rachmaninoff reached the United States; and war photographer Robert Capa (born André Friedmann in Hungary) built his legendary career after losing Hungarian citizenship.
Yet the system's limitations and embedded compromises revealed troubling aspects of international refugee protection. Academic research, particularly Kacey Bengel's 2022 analysis "Understanding the Nansen Passport: A System of Manipulation," demonstrates that states used the passport system "more prominently as a tool for self-interested political maneuverings rather than humanitarian concern." The passport did not entitle holders to jobs, welfare, or protection from removal—only identification. Countries suspicious of repeated renewal requests could deny extensions. Eastern European Jews were explicitly excluded despite Nansen's 1926 request, with the League of Nations ruling that only refugees from "political circumstances, more especially the consequences of the war" qualified, deliberately excluding ethnic minorities facing persecution. Armenians waited until 1924—two years after the genocide that displaced them—before receiving coverage, and even then only 38 states signed the expanded agreement versus 52 for the original.
Nabokov's personal accounts capture the passport's dual nature as both lifeline and stigma. While it enabled survival, he described holders as "little better than a criminal on parole" who "had to go through most hideous ordeals every time he wished to travel from one country to another, and the smaller the countries the worse the fuss they made." He missed his mother's funeral in Prague for want of a visa. Journalist Dorothy Thompson offered a contrasting 1938 assessment: "The Nansen certificate is the greatest thing that has happened for the individual refugee... it returned his lost identity." This tension between enabling mobility and marking vulnerable status would resurface in modern digital identity initiatives.
The system's structural innovations nevertheless established precedents that shaped international refugee law. The October 28, 1933 Geneva Convention formalized the Nansen passport's legal status, adopted by 14 countries through the Nansen International Office for Refugees—established immediately after Nansen's sudden death from a heart attack on May 13, 1930, while having tea on his balcony at age 68. The Office continued his work, intervening in over 800,000 individual cases and reducing refugee numbers from over 1 million to under 500,000 before winning the 1938 Nobel Peace Prize (Nansen himself had won in 1922) and dissolving that December. The 1951 UN Refugee Convention incorporated the Nansen passport's main features into Article 28, requiring states to issue Convention Travel Documents to lawfully residing refugees. Modern refugee travel documents worldwide descend directly from Nansen's 1922 innovation.
Nearly a century after the original Nansen passport, multiple initiatives explicitly invoke his legacy while attempting to harness digital technology for identity solutions. The most successful operational system, the UN World Food Programme's Building Blocks blockchain platform, has served over 1 million refugees in Jordan, Bangladesh, and Ukraine since 2017, processing $555 million through 25 million transactions while eliminating $3.5 million in bank fees—a 98% reduction versus traditional banking. Refugees use iris scans or fingerprints linked to UNHCR's biometric database to purchase groceries and receive cash assistance, with transactions completing in minutes rather than the weeks required for paper vouchers. During the 2020 Beirut blast, Building Blocks rapidly coordinated $59 million to 130,000 people through 17 organizations. The Ukraine expansion in 2024 involved 65 organizations preventing $67 million in duplicated assistance while serving 3 million people.
Yet Building Blocks reveals the gap between blockchain rhetoric and humanitarian reality. The system runs on a private, permissioned blockchain where WFP controls network access and can theoretically rewrite transaction histories. Only 2-3 organizations control nodes, drastically reducing the decentralized and trustless aspects that blockchain advocates typically emphasize. WFP's Houman Haddad candidly acknowledges: "Of course we could do all of what we're doing today without using blockchain." Critics note that traditional databases could accomplish the same functions, questioning whether blockchain adds genuine value or primarily attracts funding through technological novelty. More concerning, the system stores no personally identifiable information on the blockchain but links transactions to biometric data through external databases, creating potential privacy vulnerabilities. Academic analysis warns that "digital identities are being created that are permanently linked to biometric indicators which could then be hacked and traced back to family members."
The ID2020 Alliance, a public-private partnership founded in 2014 involving Microsoft, Accenture, UNHCR, and other major organizations, explicitly references the Nansen passport legacy in promoting self-sovereign identity (SSI) for the billion-plus undocumented people worldwide. Pilot projects in Thailand's Mae La refugee camp provided 35,000 Karen refugees with iris-based biometric digital identities linked to blockchain for medical records and credentials. Similar initiatives deployed in Indonesia, Bangladesh, and elsewhere test various approaches to portable digital identity. The vision emphasizes user control—refugees owning and managing their data rather than depending on government or organizational databases.
However, 2020 ethnographic research on SSI for refugees found "embryonic technology with indeterminate properties and benefits" facing fundamental tensions. Researchers noted that "people we are helping are a long way from understanding what it would mean to have self-sovereign data," raising questions about meaningful consent when power imbalances mean refusing the system could mean losing aid. The risk exists that "corporations or governments may use these systems to control people's digital existence" despite decentralization claims. With no guarantee that refugees will exercise genuine control over their information, these systems may "feed into the powers of corporations and states over refugee populations"—precisely mirroring how the original Nansen passport served state interests in tracking and relocating refugees as much as it protected them.
The most ambitious current proposal, Worldcoin (rebranded World Network in 2024), co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, has onboarded 20 million participants globally through iris-scanning "Orb" devices that verify human uniqueness using zero-knowledge proofs. November 2024 saw the launch of World ID Passport Credential, allowing users in Chile, Colombia, Malaysia, and South Korea to link NFC-enabled passports for additional verification. While not explicitly designed for refugees, Worldcoin's scale and technology prompted Vladislav Solodkiy to propose Nansen.ID as a refugee-focused alternative targeting 550 million people in sanctioned countries. Solodkiy's conceptual project invokes Nansen's name directly and published an e-book "Von Nansen bis Navalny" connecting historical statelessness to contemporary digital identity challenges. However, Nansen.ID remains conceptual rather than operational, with its website requiring user sign-up to be notified "when there are enough of us to go public."
Earlier attempts proved even more limited. Bitnation's Blockchain Emergency ID (BE-ID), launched September 2015 during the European refugee crisis, issued approximately 40 blockchain-based identification documents proving family relationships and offered Bitcoin visa debit cards requiring no bank account. Despite winning the 2017 Netexplo Grand Prix Award and coverage in The Economist and Wall Street Journal, Bitnation ceased operations by August 2022, demonstrating the challenge of sustaining reactive crisis responses without institutional backing. Finland's MONI blockchain startup achieved more success collaborating with the Finnish Immigration Service to provide prepaid MasterCards linked to blockchain-stored digital identity numbers, allowing refugees to open bank accounts without passports—but limited documentation exists about current scale or status.
Nansen's legacy persists not only in policy and technology but throughout global culture, from geographic features to artistic works. The polar regions bear his mark most prominently: Mount Fridtjof Nansen in Antarctica towers at 4,070 meters, discovered and named by Roald Amundsen in 1911; Nansen Basin and the Nansen-Gakkel Ridge define major Arctic Ocean features; Nansen Land stretches across northwestern Greenland; and various Nansen Islands dot the Kara Sea and Franz Josef Land. Beyond Earth, asteroid 853 Nansenia orbits the sun while Nansen craters mark both the Moon's north pole and Mars. Canada's Mount Nansen rises in Yukon, completing a geographic legacy spanning multiple continents and celestial bodies.
Armenia honors Nansen with particular devotion, reflecting gratitude for his work addressing the Armenian Genocide's aftermath. The Fridtjof Nansen Museum opened in Yerevan's Nansen Park in 2014, featuring books, films, posters, and sculptures documenting his humanitarian efforts. A prominent statue stands at the museum entrance within a memorial complex containing 30+ monuments to Armenian history and friends of the Armenian nation. Nansen wrote "Armenia and the Near East" (1923) and "Deceived People" (1925) after visiting Armenia, works considered "pillars of the Armenian cause" for raising international awareness. Though his ambitious plan to establish an Armenian national home through irrigation projects in Soviet Armenia failed due to lack of funding, the Nansen International Office later resettled 10,000 Armenians in Yerevan and 40,000 in Syria and Lebanon.
Russia similarly commemorates Nansen's humanitarian intervention during the nation's most desperate period. A monument near Moscow's Red Cross office honors his repatriation of nearly 500,000 WWI prisoners and his famine relief work that saved millions during 1921-1923. Streets in multiple Russian cities bear his name, and the 1968 Norwegian-Soviet biographical film "Just a Life: The Story of Fridtjof Nansen" represented cross-Cold War cultural cooperation celebrating shared humanitarian values. "Week of Nansen" events in Moscow around his 150th anniversary demonstrated continuing cultural resonance.
Contemporary artistic projects reimagine the Nansen passport for modern crises with striking creativity. Anneli Skaar's 2020 artist's book "Nansen's Pastport," created for the passport's centennial, takes the form of a fine press volume shaped like a passport, bound in North American salmon leather with high-resolution scans of U.S. currency creating dystopian imagery of flooded cities and toxic oceans. The text uses Nansen's own words from his 1922 Nobel Prize lecture, reimagining the passport as a climate refugee document for humanity in a warming world. Now held in the Library of Congress Rare Book Collection, the United Nations Library Geneva, and other major institutions, this artwork transforms historical artifact into contemporary warning.
Freya Gabie's ongoing performance project "Hold the Line" (2016-present) retraces historic Nansen passport refugee routes on foot, following the exact paths and timescales of 70+ documented journeys. Her 2019 walk followed Pavel Kiprianovitch Kastorny's 1929 Bulgaria-to-France route, 90 years after the original, creating drawings of small stones along the way—one sent to people worldwide to connect with the journey, another forming an archive. The University of West of England tracked the journey in real-time, emphasizing contemporary relevance as Middle Eastern refugees use the same routes today. These artistic interventions keep Nansen's humanitarian vision tangible for new generations facing similar displacement crises.
Literary representations span from contemporary biographies to novels using the Nansen passport as narrative device. Alexandra Grabbe's 2024 short story collection "The Nansen Factor: Refugee Stories" traces Russian refugees and descendants across a century from the Bolshevik Revolution to modern America, with settings in St. Petersburg, Paris, Shanghai, and contemporary United States. French author Alexis Jenni's 2023 "Le passeport de Monsieur Nansen" explores Nansen's transition from polar champion to Nobel laureate humanitarian. The FRAM Museum's 2023-2024 exhibition "Fridtjof Nansen – The Artist" presented the majority of his watercolors, pastels, and sketches for the first time, revealing his considerable talent for Arctic landscape painting—an aspect of his life rarely examined alongside exploration and humanitarianism.
Theatre productions invoke Nansen's story to explore contemporary themes. Tony Harrison's 2008 epic verse play "Fram," premiered at London's National Theatre, combined classical ballet with Brechtian elements to trace Nansen's journey from Westminster Abbey to the Arctic ship and later League of Nations work, examining celebrity humanitarian campaigns. Chantal Bilodeau's play "Forward," performed at Kansas State University (2015-2016) and the University of Winnipeg (2020), used Nansen's North Pole passion to explore climate change consequences, moving backward in time from 2017 to 1893 while incorporating traditional songs, European opera, and contemporary Norwegian electro-pop. These cultural works ensure Nansen's story continues evolving to address present concerns rather than remaining frozen in historical commemoration.
Nine vessels currently bear Nansen's name in active service. The third research vessel Dr. Fridtjof Nansen, delivered in January 2017, serves as the only research ship worldwide flying the UN flag, enabling it to sail freely across jurisdictional boundaries. Built to the strictest underwater noise control standards, this super-silent platform conducts fish stock assessment and marine ecosystem studies along African and Asian coasts, training scientists from developing countries and supporting sustainable fisheries management. Five Fridtjof Nansen-class frigates patrol Norwegian waters as advanced naval vessels, while the 2020-launched cruise ship MS Fridtjof Nansen conducts expedition cruises to Arctic and Antarctic regions for Hurtigruten Expeditions, registered at Longyearbyen, Svalbard—the northernmost cruise ship registration and naming ceremony ever held. This practical continuation of Nansen's name in service of science, security, and exploration honors his multifaceted legacy more meaningfully than passive monuments.
Contemporary refugee and statelessness challenges dwarf those Nansen confronted. At the end of 2024, 123.2 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide—nearly doubling in just a decade—with 4.4 million officially recognized as stateless though the true figure is believed considerably higher since only 101 countries report data. The Rohingya represent the largest stateless population at approximately 1.8 million people, while 24 countries still deny women equal rights to confer nationality to children, perpetuating generational statelessness. Seventy percent of Syrian refugees lacked national ID cards when entering host countries, and the World Bank estimates 850 million people globally have no official identification, blocking access to banking, healthcare, education, employment, and legal protection.
UNHCR's 2023 Global Refugee Forum launched the "21st Century Nansen Passport" multi-stakeholder pledge, explicitly invoking the historical document while calling for states to provide and accept machine-readable refugee travel documents allowing departure and return without refoulement risk. This initiative acknowledges: "While refugee travel documents are not new—the first were issued by Fridtjof Nansen in 1922 through the League of Nations"—yet emphasizes improvements like biometric/ICAO standards, permanent rather than annually renewable validity, and universal recognition across 145+ countries. Over 15 states have committed to this framework, representing genuine progress in international cooperation, though implementation remains uneven.
The critical question becomes: can Nansen passport principles work at modern scale and with contemporary technology? Evidence suggests cautious optimism with major caveats. Building Blocks demonstrates that when backed by institutional authority (UN agencies), focused on specific use cases (food assistance distribution), and designed with privacy considerations (no PII on blockchain), digital identity systems can achieve remarkable results—serving 1 million refugees with 98% cost reduction. African nations increasingly integrate refugees into national digital ID systems, with Ethiopia's model enabling SIM cards and bank accounts using refugee IDs, representing sustainable solutions that avoid parallel systems. The EU Payment Accounts Directive legally guarantees basic bank accounts for refugees and stateless persons, though enforcement remains inconsistent, particularly discriminating against Syrian refugees from sanctioned countries despite legal rights.
However, academic reassessment of the original Nansen passport reveals sobering limitations that contemporary projects risk repeating. Kacey Bengel's 2022 analysis demonstrates the system was "more prominently used as a tool for self-interested political maneuverings rather than humanitarian concern," with states using passports to track and strategically relocate refugees rather than purely protect them. Eastern European Jews faced explicit exclusion despite genocide, while Armenians waited two years after their genocide before receiving coverage. The passport did not make refugees "feel welcome or valued" and provided no guarantees about employment, welfare, or protection from removal. States filtered Russian refugees toward borders with the USSR for political purposes, demonstrating how humanitarian systems serve state interests when those interests diverge from refugee welfare.
Modern digital identity projects face analogous risks amplified by technology's permanence and surveillance capabilities. Blockchain-based biometric systems create permanent associations between individuals and refugee status that cannot be changed if compromised. Margie Cheesman, political geographer researching refugee technology, warns that projects "conjure blockchain solutions to draw funding and attention" while often "ignoring the real risks to aid workers and refugees." Without privacy-preserving-by-default design, these systems enable unprecedented tracking and control. The fundamental tension persists: who governs the infrastructure determines who has power. Permissioned blockchains controlled by organizations like WFP or corporate coalitions like ID2020 offer little genuine decentralization. Public blockchains storing sensitive personal data create permanent privacy violations. Self-sovereign identity remains "embryonic technology with indeterminate properties" facing competing logics around technology neutrality, refugee capacities, and global governance versus nation-state power.
Peter Gatrell, historian at University of Manchester, observes that the original Nansen passport "represented a degree of creativity that is sorely lacking in the contemporary world" yet notes it "was as much about assisting host states as it was about giving refugees a degree of legal status." The crucial difference: Nansen's emphasis on "enabling mobility stands in sharp contrast to the current global emphasis on deterrence." Contemporary digital identity initiatives must confront this fundamental tension. Are they designed to enable refugee mobility, self-reliance, and human flourishing—or primarily to help states track, manage, and contain displaced populations? The answer determines whether modern Nansen passport reincarnations fulfill his humanitarian vision or merely apply new technologies to old patterns of control.
UNHCR High Commissioner Filippo Grandi declared in 2020 that ending statelessness is "a matter of political will," emphasizing that "the COVID-19 pandemic has shown more than ever the need for inclusion and the urgency to resolve statelessness." Yet 2025 UNHCR funding cuts placed 11.6 million forcibly displaced people at risk of losing urgently-needed assistance, demonstrating how political will falters despite humanitarian rhetoric. Humanitarian resources "remain nearly the same" while displacement has doubled, revealing the structural mismatch between need and response. Technology cannot overcome political unwillingness to grant rights, confer citizenship, or welcome refugees. As Michael Soussan, former UN worker, argued in 2015: "Only a rapid effort to revamp global refugee laws will permit a peaceful and managed transition... Refugees need and deserve real passports"—meaning citizenship and belonging, not just portable identification.
Fridtjof Nansen's legacy illuminates both the possibilities and perils of international humanitarian innovation. His Nansen passport enabled 450,000 stateless refugees to travel, work, and rebuild lives when no nation would claim them, establishing principles that shaped the 1951 Refugee Convention and continue influencing refugee law today. The UNHCR Nansen Refugee Award, established 1954 and continuing annually, honors those exemplifying his courage and creativity. His name graces research vessels serving African coastal nations for over 40 years, military frigates protecting Norwegian waters, museums in Armenia celebrating humanitarian friendship, streets in cities from Glasgow to Yerevan, and mountains from Antarctica to the Moon. Cultural works from artist's books to theatre productions reimagine his passport concept for climate refugees and contemporary displacement, keeping his vision alive for new generations.
Yet honest historical assessment reveals uncomfortable truths. The Nansen passport system succeeded partly because it served state interests in tracking and managing refugee populations, enabling political manipulation alongside humanitarian protection. Jews faced deliberate exclusion; Armenians received coverage only after devastating delay; holders endured stigma and discrimination despite legal documents. Modern reincarnations risk repeating these patterns through digital means. Blockchain-based biometric systems promise empowerment while potentially enabling unprecedented surveillance and control. Self-sovereign identity remains technologically immature, and genuine refugee agency over data faces structural barriers when aid depends on participation. Corporate and governmental control persists despite decentralization rhetoric, mirroring how the original League of Nations system ultimately answered to member states rather than refugees themselves.
The scale difference proves daunting: Nansen's 450,000 passports across 52 countries versus today's 123 million displaced people across 195 nations with competing sovereignty claims and geopolitical tensions the League of Nations never faced. Building Blocks' success serving 1 million refugees demonstrates operational viability for specific use cases with institutional backing, while the 21st Century Nansen Passport pledge shows over 15 states willing to commit to machine-readable travel documents with universal recognition. African national ID integration and the EU Payment Accounts Directive represent promising frameworks. These initiatives prove that Nansen's core insight—enabling mobility through portable, internationally recognized identity—remains sound.
Success requires learning from historical failures rather than romanticizing past solutions. Effective modern systems must prioritize genuine refugee agency and privacy protection, not just state interests in tracking populations. They should address root causes like discriminatory nationality laws and political persecution rather than merely managing displacement symptoms. Multi-stakeholder governance prevents single-entity control, while regional cooperation allows proven approaches to scale gradually. Most critically, technical innovation cannot substitute for political will to grant rights, confer citizenship, and welcome displaced people as full members of society. Nansen's greatest legacy may be demonstrating that humanitarian creativity matters intensely—but only when paired with international cooperation, moral courage, and unflinching commitment to human dignity over state convenience. The question facing contemporary policymakers, technologists, and humanitarian organizations is whether we possess the vision to honor that legacy by creating systems that genuinely serve refugees rather than merely digitizing old patterns of exclusion and control.