Statelessness and the dangers of being merely human

Without the right to belong to a recognised political community, Arendt argued that refugees are most vulnerable when they are defined as merely human. Reading Arendt’s writing on statelessness in tandem with Giorgio Agamben, Seyla Benhabib, Judith Butler, and Edward Said, the chapter calls attention to the conflict between the sovereign nation-state, human rights, and the rights of the refugee. While the first part of the chapter calls attention to existential and social dislocation, the second part focuses on the legal and political paradoxes that refugees face with respect to the nation-state and argues for the relevance of Arendt’s argument about the hypocrisy of human rights. Despite the existence of international laws protecting the rights of refugees, the stateless still fall outside the very laws that were designed to protect them.