Hannah Arendt by unknow

Author:unknow
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 1782434
Publisher: Taylor and Francis

Conclusion: rethinking statelessness in an age of migration

Various contemporary processes and practices related to globalization, particularly international migration, have deprived millions of people from the protections of citizenship rights. Today more than 200 million people are estimated to be living outside their country of birth. In addition, there are approximately 29 million internally displaced people who can no longer appeal to their states for guarantees of their rights. Arendt’s effort to understand statelessness as a “mass phenomenon” (Arendt [1951] 2004: 352) becomes all the more pertinent within this global context in which growing numbers of people find themselves “ejected from the old trinity of state-people-territory” (ibid.: 358). As many scholars have highlighted, her analysis of statelessness achieves a new significance in understanding the contemporary plight of asylum-seekers, refugees (Owens 2011; Xenos 1993), undocumented immigrants (Kesby 2012: 92–117; Krause 2008) and even citizens who have become de facto stateless due to social exclusion (Somers 2008), homelessness (Feldman 2004) and poverty (Hayden 2007).

But if there are various parallels between the contemporary landscape and the one Arendt observed, there are also some differences that need to be noted. When Arendt wrote about statelessness, she was pointing to the “somewhat shadowy existence” of human rights, saying that they “never became law” (Arendt [1951] 2004: 357). Since the end of the Second World War, and particularly in the last few decades, we have witnessed the global proliferation of human rights norms, mechanisms and organizations. Human rights no longer seem to be simply abstract commitments, and they are recognized as central to a new understanding of legitimate statehood that rests on the idea that a state does not have exclusive authority when it comes to the fundamental rights of its residents (Keck & Sikkink 1998; Risse et al. 1999). These developments are seen as crucial for various categories of migrants. Even if one does not agree with the strong claim that the rise of a universal human rights framework has led to the decline of national citizenship (Jacobson 1996) and the emergence of a postnational membership (Soysal 1994), it is now largely accepted that there has been a shift from nationality to universal personhood in the basis of entitlement to rights, allowing migrants to claim many of the rights that were formerly associated with citizenship status (Benhabib 2004; Sassen 2002).

These developments might give the misleading impression that the condition of rightlessness that Arendt described in her analysis of statelessness has altogether disappeared from the contemporary landscape. But “the perplexities of the Rights of Man” manifest themselves in new ways in the international human rights norms, and some of the contemporary developments such as the emergence of an increasingly restrictive global apparatus of immigration control make it increasingly difficult to navigate the paradoxes of human rights for millions of migrants.

The constitutive tension between “man” and “citizen”, highlighted in Arendt’s analysis of the 1789 Declaration, has not completely disappeared with the shift to “human” rights. Especially important in this regard are the perplexities or aporias arising from the

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