banal bureaucratic procedures.
Using a comparative case study of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic (DR), I show how the stateless are either forced into liminality—a realm of formal nonbelonging everywhere—or made to take on the nationality of a country with which they do not identify (Haiti) when the state of their birth can no longer tolerate their ambiguous status. In both instances, I illustrate how the stateless are simultaneously rooted and displaced. They are rooted in that they are born and continue to reside within the country of their birth (although the latter excludes them); yet they are displaced in that they face similar constraints on their ability to be self-determining agents and to enjoy human rights, freedoms, and protections akin to other forced migrants. In fact, their lack of movement is one of the primary differences between them and the “rightless” of whom Hannah Arendt wrote last century.6
Citizenship, the State, and Human Rights
Writing in the immediate aftermath of World War II, Arendt described how millions of people were essentially rendered nonhuman through denationalization procedures and forced migratory movement. These people, who had once belonged to the community of nations as citizens of some state, were now stateless, “the scum of the earth” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 341). They “lived outside the pale of the law” (353) and were homeless, unprotected beings that no state was willing to adopt. Human rights, which were supposed to apply to all persons regardless of national origin or other status, had ceased to exist for them because “it turned out that the moment human beings lacked their own government and had to fall back upon their minimum rights, no authority was left to protect them and no institution was willing to guarantee them” (370).
The stateless epitomized the hollowness of human rights discourse for Arendt. When a man “is nothing but a man,” she argued, he loses “the very qualities which make it possible for other people to treat him as a fellow-man” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 381). Arendt, herself a stateless person for many years, consequently argued that the great “calamity” to befall the stateless “is not that they are deprived of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, or of equality before the law and freedom of opinion … but that they no longer belong to any community whatsoever” (375). She therefore proposed that human rights be “redefined as a right to the human condition itself, which depends upon belonging to some human community” (631; italics added).
Since Arendt’s time, the “right to have rights” has been interpreted in many different ways.7 The first and most common usage is that of the right to formal citizenship in a state or the right to a nationality.8 In other cases the nonformal aspect of political belonging, such as “the right of political inclusion” (Michelman 1996, 205) or “the right to politics” (Schaap 2011, 33), is considered. Others define it as the right to personhood, whether this is “the right … to be a legal person, entitled to certain inalienable rights, regardless of the status of their political membership” (Benhabib 2004b, 3) or “the right to human personhood—recognition as a moral equal” (Somers 2008, 25). Yet despite the various understandings of the “right to have rights,” no right to belong, at least as Arendt understood it, exists.
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) perhaps comes closest to a right to belong when it asserts that each person has a right to a nationality (UN 1948, Article 15),9 that is, to belong formally as a member to a state. But the UDHR nowhere describes how this right is to be enacted. Even its hard law offspring10 are silent when discussing how to translate the right to a nationality “into a specific, actionable duty on the part of any particular state” (Goldston 2006, 339). As Paul Weis writes, “There are no rules of international law which impose a duty on States to confer their nationality on certain individuals at birth” (1956, 242). The right to a nationality is therefore “a right without a remedy.”11
The American Convention on Human Rights, the human rights treaty organ of the Organization of American States (OAS), also asserts that each person has the right to a nationality, and goes further than the UDHR and its affiliated human rights treaties by declaring that it is a nonderogable right (OAS 1969, Articles 20 and 27). The OAS is also remarkably Arendtian in that it contends that the right to a nationality is not only inviolable, but is “one of the most important rights of man, after the right to life itself, because all the prerogatives, guarantees and benefits man derives from his membership in a political and social community—the State—stem from or are supported by this right” (OAS 1977, n. pag.). The human right to a nationality, therefore, is both an intrinsic and an instrumental human right. It is an essential component of recognized, formal belonging in a world carved into states; yet, as I show in this book, its fulfillment is also necessary for people to access any number of other human rights (from education, work, and healthcare to social security, a juridical personality, and freedom of movement).12 Moreover, citizenship is of such import in the international sphere that no international norm or recognition of the right to be voluntarily stateless exists. One must be a citizen of somewhere13 and there is an international norm against statelessness (Adjami and Harrington 2008, 103; Donner 1994, 196; Spiro 2004, 99; van Waas 2008, 39).
While most states seem to accept the international norm that people must not be deprived arbitrarily of their citizenship, fewer are willing to accept that states must provide membership to the stateless populations on their territory,14 or that they cannot deny or revoke citizenship from individuals on “reasonable” grounds, even if it renders people stateless. It is for these reasons, and others, that more than ten million people are stateless globally.
Whereas Arendt firmly believed that formal belonging, or citizenship in the state, is necessary to access rights, freedoms, and protections,15 recent scholarship challenges this position. Beginning with Yasemin Soysal’s Limits of Citizenship (1994), it has become increasingly common for scholars to describe citizenship as a status that is losing importance in a globalizing world of increased migratory movements and human rights provisions. Soysal’s work concretized the concept of postnationalism, wherein “the logic of personhood supersedes the logic of national citizenship” as the “organizing principle of membership in contemporary polities” (Soysal 1994, 164). Through her study of guest workers in several European countries, Soysal argued that citizens and noncitizens were basically treated the same way when it came to rights provisions in state policies. She found that the basis for this similarity in treatment was host-state respect for the human rights regime, which acknowledges the rights of all persons regardless of race, national, or social origin. Soysal therefore posited that
contemporary membership formations have superseded the dichotomy that opposes the national citizen and the alien, by including populations that were previously defined as outside the national polity. Rights that used to belong solely to nationals are now extended to foreign populations, thereby undermining the very basis of national citizenship. (137)
Works from diverse scholarly genres have since taken a postnational orientation and sought to illustrate the changing nature of the citizen-state relationship. Some authors have followed in Soysal’s footsteps by investigating the impact of the human rights regime on state treatment of noncitizens. David Jacobson, for example, contends that the new international order is based upon human rights and has effectively devalued citizenship in the state as it erodes “the distinction between ‘citizen’ and ‘alien’” (1996, 8–9, 39). Linda Bosniak similarly argues that “the status of aliens in liberal democratic societies is, in many respects, hardly distinguishable from that of citizens” (2006, 34) due to noncitizens’ ability to press human rights claims and enjoy the rights of citizenship without possessing formal citizenship status. Seyla Benhabib also concludes in her respective works on noncitizen rights that “one does not have to be part of a territorially defined people to enjoy human rights” (Benhabib 2001, 36).16
Thus, whereas Arendt deemed personhood insufficient for rights enjoyment, the premise of many scholars writing in the postnational vein is that personhood is enough to access
