exclusion from an “organized [political] community,” as in Arendt’s time, continues to be problematic in the twenty-first century. In contradistinction to Arendt’s time, however, Chapter 2 shows that statelessness is not a “Europe-only” phenomenon, one of cross-border movements, or one that is necessarily generated by conflict, crisis, or persecution. Stateless people are found globally, within all regime types, and are generally physically rooted in a place, even though displaced in other ways.
Chapters 3 and 4 bring the discussion of global statelessness to the state level with case studies of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, respectively. These chapters detail how democracies can forcibly displace people under noncrisis and nonconflict situations via legal, political, and bureaucratic means. Specifically, Chapter 3 explains how seemingly neutral citizenship laws, when situated within a politicized citizenship-granting process and combined with bureaucratic inefficiencies, work together to displace Bahamian-born persons of primarily Haitian descent56 into liminality or into the category of Haitian national, often without confirming that said persons are Haitian nationals in practice.
Chapter 4 continues the analysis of how the human right to a nationality is implemented in practice by examining the ways in which the Dominican state erects boundaries of belonging against the racialized “Other” within its borders. Via constitutional amendment, the retroactive application of laws, and arbitrary bureaucratic procedures, the chapter demonstrates how people can be turned into foreigners in their own country. Both chapters thus illustrate the precariousness of belonging under state-defined conditions and the ways in which individuals can be forcibly displaced while remaining “in place.”
Whereas Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how two democracies of the developing world are engaging in forced displacement within their territories, Chapter 5 examines the effects of forced displacement in situ from an individual perspective. Using Victor Turner’s analysis of liminality as a basis, the chapter illustrates how statelessness affects an individual’s sense of belonging, his or her ability to access human rights, and prospects of being a fully self-determining agent. It thus demonstrates that the consequences of not being a citizen of somewhere in practice has ramifications far beyond the legal realm and it directly challenges the postnational claim that human rights have decoupled from citizenship.
The sixth and final chapter takes into account the forced nature of the stateless’ displacement, making the case that the fulfillment of the human right to a nationality and the resolution of statelessness are matters of global distributive justice (GDJ). It is here I argue for a human right to belong that is predicated upon individual agency and choice and is less statist in orientation than current membership practices. For noncitizen insiders, this right consists of formally belonging to a specific place from birth—the state in which one was born—and the right to choose to continue to belong at maturity.
In conclusion, Statelessness in the Caribbean asks that we move our gaze inward to evaluate the effects of practices of citizenship deprivation and denial enacted upon those who come from within our own polities. As individuals who try to make their life within the state of their birth, even as it excludes them, the stateless suffer a form of forced displacement that is not unlike that faced by other types of forced migrants. They, too, are susceptible to human rights violations and face significant limitations on their ability to carry out key life projects. They are, in effect, displaced even as they remain rooted in the communities of their birth.
CHAPTER 2
Statelessness
A stateless person is someone who is like a ghost—they are invisible to all the things we take for granted.
—UNHCR Goodwill Ambassador Barbara Hendricks
Historical and Contemporary Statelessness
Statelessness is not a new phenomenon. People have been displaced from formal belonging in the state in various ways since the 1800s. In nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Europe, individuals were rendered stateless as a form of punishment for criminal activities or because they were deemed threats to social order.1 Even today, many countries’ laws allow for denaturalization of an individual if he or she is deemed a threat to “social order.” It was not until the twentieth century, however, that statelessness became a group, as opposed to an individual, problem.2 With the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman empires, groups of people found themselves stateless when they were prevented from acquiring citizenship in the newly formed states. Hannah Arendt, herself a stateless person for many years, called this group the Heimatlosen, the “oldest group of stateless people” ([1948] 2004, 353).3 Jews were the primary group affected by these events, although other minority groups, such as Armenians and Roma, were also affected.
The establishment of totalitarian regimes of different persuasions added to the growing number of stateless persons in Europe during the early to mid-twentieth century. “Denationalization became a powerful weapon of totalitarian politics” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 343). Individuals fleeing Communism in the wake of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, for example, were summarily denationalized and many of those fleeing Fascist Italy, Japan, and Germany were also rendered stateless (Torpey 2000, 124–26). While Jews and Armenians “showed the highest proportion of statelessness” from such discriminatory denationalization procedures during this time (Arendt [1948] 2004, 358; see also 367), “Trotskyites,” Spanish Republicans, and other political enemies were also targeted (343). In fact, Marc Vishniak lists the following groups as affected by statelessness during this period:
Armenians who had escaped from Kurdish and Turkish massacres; Russians who had fled from the Soviet Union; the inhabitants of the Saar who had voted for France or for the League of Nations at the time of the Saar plebiscite; the Assyro-Chaldeans and Assyrians who had left Iraq after the massacres in that country; the Jews, democrats and socialists who had fled Nazi Germany; Austrian Jews, monarchists, democrats and socialists; Rumanians who opposed the dictatorship, and Rumanian Jews; anti-Fascist Italians and Italian Jews; Spanish Republicans, Czechoslovakian democrats, etc. After the outbreak of the war Poles, Norwegians, Netherlanders, Belgians, Frenchmen, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Estonians, Lithuanians and others joined their ranks. (Vishniak 1945, 34)
During this time of economic decline, “disintegration” and “hatred” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 342), statelessness became a pervasive, and serious, problem. Arendt likened statelessness to being expelled “from humanity altogether” (377). Once individuals no longer belonged formally to some state through citizenship, they became “outlaw(s)” (360, 363) and “barbarians” (384) whose only way of escaping from their political and legal nonexistence was either to commit a crime or to demonstrate some sort of genius (364). In a world of sovereign states, premised as it was and continues to be on individuals belonging formally to some state, Arendt argued that the stateless represented a possible regression from civilization (382). They were—and still are—liminal subjects, caught in the space of the “betwixt and between” that lies outside states’ nationality classifications.4
Although the exact number of stateless persons during this period is unknown, and although the stateless were a diverse lot, Arendt’s account describes certain commonalities among them. First, statelessness
