Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Arendt and the Precarious Status of Non-Citizens

Abstract

Global population movements bring to the fore the plight of the people who can no longer exercise their citizenship rights as they move across borders and find it increasingly difficult to exercise human rights. To analyze this contemporary problem, I reinterpret Hannah Arendt's notion of rightlessness - a seemingly anachronistic notion in an age that is increasingly defined by the expansion of human rights. Contesting narrow readings of rightlessness as a legal dispossession that has been largely remedied since Arendt wrote her analysis, I foreground its and ontological dimensions - i.e. deprivation from community and suspension of one's human status - particularly by focusing on the increasingly widespread practices of detaining and deporting non-citizens. To understand what rightlessness entails, I join scholarly efforts to read across the conventional divides drawn between Arendt's historical analyses (e.g. The Origins of Totalitarianism) and political theoretical works (e.g. The Human Condition). Such a reading also brings to the fore otherwise unnoticed critical potentials of Arendt's oft-criticized concepts and distinctions (e.g. action/work/labor) in identifying and questioning the privileges and exclusions of an international order organized around the principle of nationality. To elaborate this point, the paper puts Arendt's theory into conversation with contemporary theorists such as Giorgio Agamben and Judith Butler.