Beyond the Nation State: Rereading Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees” Eighty Years Later

Abstract

Hannah Arendt’s seminal yet overlooked essay “We Refugees” was written and published in Menorah Journal in 1943 while she was still a stateless refugee. In this essay, Arendt vividly describes the impossible situation that the stateless Jewish refugees faced before and during Second World War. However, Arendt does not reduce it to a series of individual tragedies, but instead develops a highly original analysis of refugees as a systematic political phenomenon that exposes the limitations of the nation-state system and simultaneously points beyond it. This analysis remains more relevant than ever today, eighty years after its initial publication.