I.

Introduction – Locating the Stateless Figure

Political theorists have begun to more seriously consider instances of de jure statelessness,

how it arises and is perpetuated by states through legal exclusion, and the normative implications

of this phenomenon for how we theorize the boundaries of political membership and citizenship.

Recent scholarship in this vein tends to begin by highlighting the invisibility of the stateless from

liberal political theory scholarship on questions of political rights, distributive justice, and

membership in the political community. For example, Kristy Belton, in a recent article, turns to

popular accounts of political membership and rights found in the work of Seyla Benhabib and

Michael Walzer and notes that the stateless appear in a limited capacity throughout these

theorists’ works and their legal and political status is either conflated with that of refugees, or

when they are explicitly acknowledged as de jure stateless, their lack of citizenship is considered

to be anomalous and exceptional to the norm of membership through formal citizenship rights,

and thus, not warranting further comment. Political theorists who are interested in statelessness

are right to point out that most of the recent scholarship in political theory on issues of political

membership and the rights owed to non-citizens are centered primarily on those groups that I

will refer to as “newcomers:” migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, and other categories of

irregular migrants. These “newcomers,” according to scholars of the stateless issue, have

distracted theoretical reflection from the group of people residing within a state, who, despite not

being “foreign” in origin, are nonetheless denied full membership and lack a legally recognized

nationality in the states they inhabit. These stateless individuals unlike the newcomers are the

“the non-citizen insider.” Further, according to recent scholarship on the issue, the elision of the

issue of statelessness from liberal political theory compounds an already invisible and subaltern

position. Cast out of the domain of rights, the stateless are unable to participate politically,
benefit from distributive schemes, and come perilously close to inhabiting Agamben’s

paradigmatic condition of “bare life.”

The aim of this introductory chapter is to complicate the presumed lack of visibility of the

stateless issue in liberal political thought. My argument is that if we search for what I will term

are “figures of statelessness,” rather than stateless individuals legally defined through their lack

of nationality, we find that liberal political theory is not only replete with stateless figures, but,

more importantly, it is through the stateless figure that core tenets of liberal political thought

such as the inviolability and inalienability of certain political and human rights as well as the

contours of legal personhood become legible. My use of the term “stateless figure” is similar to

what Bonnie Honig and others have claimed is “the foreign figure” in democratic theory.

According to Honig, the “figure of the foreigner” appears in democratic theory as a founder, an

immigrant, a refugee, but also an outlaw and boundary crosser. Democracies have relied on

narratives of foreign founders to shore up their legitimacy; “outsiders” make salient and

desirable the promise of democratic norms. I conceptualize “stateless figures” as paradigmatic

Others who in liberal political theory are associated with “lawlessness” and are thought to lack

the capacity for full citizenship due to racialized perceptions of their inferiority, or who, because

they choose to remain outside of the purview of state-based legal recognition, are considered

deviant.

Like the “foreign figure,” stateless figures also perform conceptual work for modern political

theorists. One paradigmatic stateless figure in modern political thought is the slave. Scholars

have noted that the figure of the slave appears as an abstraction in modern political theory as a

way to juxtapose the difference between the full personhood that endows the abstract political

subject, generally presumed to be white and male, from those subjects who occupy the position
of “object-hood” and lack the full personhood necessary to be a rights-bearing subjects. It is also

through the metaphorical bondage of the slave that modern political thinkers are able to make

clear the stakes of legitimate governance through consent. The lack of full personhood of the

figure of the slave is taken to indicate their inability to be full citizens before the law and thus,

lacking the capacity for nationhood or nationality, the figure of the slave is also a “stateless

figure.” Political theorists, however, have also argued that though the slave is invoked

paradigmatically in modern political thought, the material effects of the institution of slavery on

the political and economic conditions at the time these texts were written suggests that a

comprehensive treatment of how slavery is figured in modern political thought necessitates

theorizing the link between material bondage and canonical ideas concerning personhood and

political rights. Prominent examples of scholarship in this vein include Susan Buck Morss’s

treatment of the Hegelian master/slave dialectic as arising out of Hegel’s political awareness of

the unprecedented events of the nineteenth century Haitian slave revolt. Political theorists have

also noted that Locke’s connection to the Royal African Company, his involvement in the

drafting of the constitution of the Carolina colony, as well as his use of Grotian just-war theory

to defend slavery in the New World point to a contradiction between his natural law inspired

theoretical injunction against bondage and his material imbrication in the institution of slavery in

the Americas. The link between the material and the symbolic in canonical treatments of slavery

suggests that theorizing the stateless figure through slavery requires both attention to how slaves

were metaphorically rendered stateless as paradigmatic examples of human beings that lacked

the capacity for full personhood and political freedom, but also how slaves themselves were

rendered stateless through a racial ascriptive logic that deemed them incapable of exercising the

full functions of citizenship and political rights.

 Another stateless figure in modern political thought is that of the outlaw. According to Renee

Jeffrey

Unlike the foreigner or stranger who is simply unknown to their host, the outlaw is

marked as being ‘other’ for the transgressions they are thought to have committed

against individuals and societies, both domestic and international. Standing outside

both the law and society, the outlaw is deemed a stranger in his own land and cast out

or self-exiled for being unwilling to submit to the rigours of the legal system.1

In Kant’s theory of the right of hospitality needed to sustain and realize the teleological

development of a global order based on cosmopolitan norms of global governance, the stateless

figure as the figure of outlawry who is “unwilling to submit to the rigours of the legal system” is

present in at least three distinct senses. First, outlaws are “inhabitants of the coasts” as well as

the “Bedouin Arabs.” According to him, “[t]he inhospitality of the inhabitants of coasts (for

instance, of the Barbary Coast) in robbing ships in neighboring seas or enslaving stranded

travelers, or the inhospitality of the inhabitants of the deserts (for instance, the Bedouin Arabs)

who view contact with nomadic tribes as conferring the right to plunder them, is thus opposed to

natural law …” The second sense in which statelessness as outlawry is present is in Kant’s

critique of European imperial practices as violations of natural law. For Kant, figures of outlawry

are also those European states who plunder the global south through economic exploitation, as

well as who through the institution of slavery, inhibit the full realization of the cosmopolitan

ideal. The third figure of outlawry are those indigenous inhabitants of the new world as well as

African slaves who are presumed to be stateless and rendered as such through the unjust practice

of settler colonialism:

1
Jeffery, “The Wolf at the Door,” 125.
 But to this perfection compare the inhospitable actions of the civilized and especially of the

commercial states of our part of the world. The injustice which they show to lands and

peoples they visit (which is equivalent to conquering them) is carried by them to terrifying

lengths. America, the lands inhabited by the Negro, the Spice Islands, the Cape, etc., were at

the time of their discovery considered by these civilized intruders as lands without owners,

for they counted the inhabitants as nothing. (Emphasis my own)

All three sets of figures of outlawry, the pirate and the Bedouin who inhabit ungovernable lands,

the European conqueror, and those indigenous and enslaved subjects, are figures of statelessness

because they are either incapable of being rights-bearing subjects due to the lands they inhabit, or

because they perpetuate the ontological conditions of statelessness as objecthood through unjust

appropriation and colonization.

My aim in highlighting these figures of statelessness in modern political thought is to

argue that as a political phenomenon, statelessness, both in how it is caused and who is presumed

to be always already stateless, is inextricably bound up with civilizational taxonomies of racial

hierarchy. In racializing statelessness, I aim to establish the groundwork for subsequent chapters’

theorization of the link between race and statelessness. Though recent scholarship on the link

between race and contemporary instances of statelessness have noted that an overwhelming

majority of the world’s stateless population are ethnic minorities there have been relatively few

studies that investigate the link between race and the state’s sovereign imperative to dictate

membership through legal practices of excluding racial others from citizenship through practices

of exile, banish, and disenfranchisement. Further, by locating the stateless figure in the modern

political theoretical development of “personhood,” which was formed through theoretical

exclusions of figures of statelessness from the purview of legal personhood and thus, citizenship,
I want to explicitly point to how material practices of slavery and settler colonialism are

instances of statelessness that made legible liberal political theory’s commitment to legitimate

governance through consent, but also to normative global principles of just conduct. That

statelessness is both a material and rhetorical referent for liberal political theory complicates the

existing assumption in scholarship on the stateless issue that the stateless are “invisible” in

liberal political thought and thus, need to be more fully represented in order for theorists to

grapple with the normative dimensions of their lack of legal nationality for questions of

membership and citizenship rights.

Another tendency in recent scholarship on the stateless issue that I hope to complicate is

the notion that the stateless approximate Agamben’s notion of “bare life.” My argument is that

such a rendering, in addition to perpetuating the problematic presumption of the lack of agency

and visibility of the stateless, a feature of Agamben’s political thought on bare life that has

already been criticized by political theorists, also departicularizes the stateless as race-less when

in fact the racialized bodies of the stateless, particularly when statelessness is perpetuated

through slavery and settler colonialism, are rendered hyper-visible through their race and legal

liminality. For example, in his criticism of Agamben’s abstract invocation of bare life, Magnus

Fiskesjo argues that the departicularized homo sacer belies the embodied-ness of its real-world

referents, “As a transhistorical-paradigmatic figure it [homo sacer] leaves aside not only its

obvious counterparts—slaves and barbarians (whose real-life referents, like homo sacer, are also

both historical and contemporary)—but also the pre-state and pre-law excommunication of

outcasts.”2 Political theorists writing about the contemporary re-emergence of large groups of

stateless peoples tend to invoke the concept of bare life to highlight the exceptionality of the

stateless condition from that of refugees and other displaced irregular migrants, and in doing so
2
Fiskesjo, 161.
they unwittingly reproduce the image of a departicularized mass of agent-less subjects. Arendt’s

reflections on the stateless are rife with such rhetoric. She notes for example that the stateless are

better off becoming criminals in order to gain recognition, “Even if he [the stateless person] is

penniless he can now get a lawyer, complain about his jailers … He is no longer scum of the

earth but important enough to be informed of all the details of the law under which he will be

tried.” The political theorist Judith Shklar in her work on citizenship notes that, “To be a stateless

individual is one of the most dreadful political fates that can befall anyone in the modern world.”

This rhetoric of statelessness as a condition of existential severity second only to death is still

present in normative political theorists’ invocation of the threat of statelessness due to the

deprivation of nationality. In the normative argument against the use of denationalization by

democracies, for example, the potential for the denationalized citizen to be rendered stateless is

considered a set of circumstances so beyond the pale that a democratic liberal state cannot both

subject someone to such a cruel and unusual punishment and retain its status as a liberal state. By

locating statelessness in settler colonial contexts and practice of enslavement, I want to suggest

that those subjected to the deprivation of nationality and full citizenship were able to both

articulate their membership and belonging in alternative ways, but also challenge the state’s

monopoly on legitimate forms of recognition by making legible their second-class status as

subaltern stateless groups within the polity.

II. Chapter 1 – Democracy, Punishment, and the Return of Banishment

Recently, due to a spate of denationalizations by Western governments as a way to address

the return of citizens who joined the Islamic State, political theorists have considered whether

democracies are justified in their use of denationalization and the stripping of citizenship as a

legal punishment. Terrorism, according to some scholars, is a uniquely political crime that in
certain instances warrants the extreme punishment of denationalization due to the nature of the

terrorists’ offense against the political community. Incarceration and other punitive forms of

disenfranchisement, according to them, are inadequate as retributive or deterrence-based

punishments for the unique offense of terroristic violence. Others, however, caution against the

practice by democratic states. These theorists argue that citizenship rights should not be

conditional on good behavior. By rendering citizenship revocable for certain classes of criminal,

the state threatens the legal inviolability of citizenship by making its status contingent. Further,

many scholars who argue against the practice of denationalization by democratic states caution

that it violates norms of equality since those subject to denationalization tend to be dual-

nationals, who, because they would not be rendered stateless by having their citizenship revoked,

are more susceptible to having revocation used as a punishment against them.

The aim of this chapter is to argue that rather than being anomalous to democratic forms of

punishment, the use of “banishment” has historically been used by democratic states to

demarcate the symbolic and normative boundaries of membership within the political

community. Thus, in this chapter, rather than ask, are democracies justified in their use of

banishment and exile as a means to punish, I instead want to ask the following: how have

democracies historically used denationalization as a means to secure allegiance and loyalty?

What does the revocation of citizenship as a punitive measure allow the democratic state to

signal about its normative value system? Political theorists who claim that denationalization

violates democratic and liberal norms of equality as well as constitutional principles against the

use of cruel and unusual punishments narrowly define both the conditions of what constitutes a

democratic practice as well as the function of punishment as an instrument of democratic

governance. The cumulative effect of both these tendencies is a delinking of the contemporary
use of citizenship revocation from the racialized logic of exclusion already inherent to

immigration policies in the Euro-American and liberal democratic context. While in the

contemporary moment the primary target of denationalization policies is the “foreign fighter” or

the “homegrown extremist,” historically, citizenship revocation and deprivation were legal

practices that were intimately bound up with the regulation of the racial and the demographic

composition of the state and as a means to secure loyalty from citizens presumed to hold foreign

allegiances. In the American context, the stripping of citizenship was specifically designed to

deter American women from marrying “foreign” men, and children of American men and

“foreign” women from being able to claim American citizenship. American women who married

foreign men and could not claim their husband’s nationality as well as those children who were

fathered by American men abroad and resided in a country with patrilineal citizenship policies,

were often either rendered de jure stateless, or lived with a precarious citizenship status that

threatened to render them stateless.

Scholarship on citizenship revocation and its justifiability as punishment for acts of terrorism

have not sufficiently contextualized the practice as a historical means of guaranteeing allegiance

and loyalty during wartime. These scholars largely take for granted that in the Euro-American

context citizenship policies are wedded to a liberal contractual model wherein the only instances

where one can justifiably lose their citizenship is if s/he voluntary renounces it in order to gain a

different nationality. Thus, the recent turn to “involuntary expatriation” is deemed to be both

“new” and concerning from a liberal rights-based perspective. Recent scholarship has begun to

problematize the notion that expulsion and involuntary expatriation are outside of the norm of

the legal institution of citizenship, and scholars who have written about the historical use of

citizenship deprivation have noted that the logic of membership in Western liberal democracies
is one where republicans notions of loyalty and allegiance are wedded to a contractual model of

citizenship policy such that the loyalty of certain classes of citizens are always already suspect

on racialized and gendered grounds which are then heightened during wartime and other

moments in history where racialized anxiety due to immigration became intertwined with the

citizenship policies of the nation.

Deirde Troy, for example, argues that the British government’s recent turn to using

citizenship deprivation as a tool of punishment needs to be read in the context of practices of

Empire that relied on population control through immigration policies that sought to “govern

[the] mobility” of subjects in the colonies based on criteria that were raced and gendered. She

specifically traces the development of deprivation policies in the UK that were put in place

between 2002 and 2018 in response to instances of “home-grown” extremist violence in the UK

and the return of British nationals who traveled to Syria to join the Islamic State as following a

similar logic of ascribing lack of loyalty and allegiance to certain populations that were similar to

those found in the Nationality and Status of Aliens Act of 1914, which granted the British

government authority to use revocation to determine appropriate British subject-hood within the

Empire.3 Ben Herzog analyzes citizenship revocation as a symbolic practice of meaning-making

in both the Israeli and U.S. context. In the Israeli context, he uses a framework derived from

Pierre Bourdieu’s paradigm of symbolic classification to argue that the rhetorical demand that

terrorists have their citizenship stripped, though seldom carried out by executive acts, are

nonetheless symbolically powerful for demarcating legitimate citizens from non-citizens. 4 In the

American context, he finds that citizenship deprivation was primarily aimed at limiting the

3
Troy, “Governing Imperial Citizenship.”
4
Herzog, “Citizenship Revocation Proposals as National Symbolic Struggles,” 441.
practice of dual-nationality, which threatens the government’s monopoly on the single allegiance

of a citizen.5

My analysis of citizenship revocation in this chapter is motivated by a similar set of

concerns that have turned scholars of citizenship away from narrowly focusing on questions of

inclusion and membership to analytically discerning why and how states come to annul or revoke

citizenship. By focusing on exclusion, I will argue, we are better positioned to assess how the

potential rendering of statelessness and the existential severity thought to mark the stateless

condition as one of the most abject statuses that could befall someone, makes revocation a

particularly potent form of punishment from a symbolic nation-building based perspective. The

state’s contemporary legal ability to determine who can be excluded needs to be placed within a

genealogical development of the practice of exile and banishment as a uniquely democratic form

of punishment. To this end, I intend in this chapter to extend the insights of recent work that has

contextualized citizenship revocation as a tool of racialized population management and a means

to secure loyalty by the state. I will do so by first situating the practice of banishment and exile

as a democratic practice that legitimates and sustains sovereign authority by turning to the

extensive scholarship on the function of banishment in Ancient Greek city-states and then turn to

the treatment of banishment as a sovereign prerogative in Hobbes’s political thought.

Danielle Allen, for example, argues in the World of Prometheus that practices of punishment

are inextricably bound up with the development of democracy since the transfer of the power to

punish from the individual to the community and eventually the state marks the transitory stages

of democratic development. Her analysis points to how the punishments of exile and banishment

were selectively meted out based on the perceived “foreign” origins of the offender as well as the

offender’s gender, with women’s exile and banishment playing a particular symbolic role in
5
Herzog and Román, Revoking Citizenship, 5.
reconstituting the civil peace after a wrong against the community had been committed. Critical

theorists have also turned to Antigone and have specifically focused on Creon’s manner of

punishing Antigone for what it suggests about the connection between gendered forms of

obedience, allegiance, and the symbolic utility of punishment in re-inscribing authority. Danielle

Allen’s treatment of exile and banishment suggests that the casting out of an individual from the

political community was also meant to be a ritual practice that purified or “cleansed” the polity

of the wrongdoer.6 Recent scholarship on the relationship between punishment, banishment, and

civic education in Hobbes’s political thought suggests that the “unmaking of citizens” is an

important sovereign prerogative for constituting and sustaining authority over the masses and

sustaining civil peace. According to Teresa Bejan, for example, stability in the polity could not

rely on traditional methods of punishment alone, but had to be supplemented with a set of

policies that regulated education in order to quell dissent and sustain a docile population. That

education is bound up with punishing as a way to sustain civil peace directly bears upon the logic

of contemporary arguments against revoking the citizenship of the terrorist “foreign fighter” who

by placing him or herself as an “enemy of the state” is taken to reflect a failure to have properly

internalized democratic and liberal norms generally transmitted through a form of civic

education.7 In both the Greek account and the modern political theoretical treatment of

punishment in Hobbes, banishment and exile are read through the political grammar of war. For

Hobbes, banishment is an appropriate punishment for those who threaten the civil peace and

attempt to inaugurate through their act of disobedience the war-like conditions of the state of

nature.8

6
Allen, The World of Prometheus, 211.
7
Jaede, “Hobbes on the Making and Unmaking of Citizens.”
8
Ibid.
 After revisiting these canonical accounts of the relationship between the symbolic

function of punishment, civic education, and the sovereign prerogative to punish in political

theory scholarship, I will turn to the distinction between corporeal and non-corporeal forms of

punishment as a sovereign practice of democratic control in Foucauldian treatments of biopower

and punishment. I will argue that contemporary practices of banishment and exile complicate the

distinction between corporeal and non-corporeal forms of punishment as well as Foucault’s

claim in Discipline and Punishment that the advent of modernity heralded new “humane” ways

of punishing. Foucault for example, states that with the advent of modernity, “Punishment, then,

will tend to become the most hidden part of the penal process.” 9 He goes onto argue that

practices of exile and internment, while arguably forms of corporal punishment because they

“touch the body,” have a fundamentally different relationship to the body than torture:

It might be objected that imprisonment, confinement, forced labour, penal servitude,

prohibition from entering certain areas, deportation – which have occupied so important a

place in modern penal systems – are “physical” penalties: unlike fines, for example, they

directly affect the body. But the punishment-body relation is not the same as it was in the

torture during public executions. The body now serves as an instrument or intermediary

…10

Scholarship on biopower and punishment has already begun to complicate this corporeal/non-

corporeal binary as it relates to punishment and sovereign power. Banu Bargu, for example,

reads the Turkish state’s effort to re-exert sovereign authority over their prison population as a

set of strategies aimed at responding to the crisis of sovereign authority brought about by these

prisoners’ decision to wage a hunger strike and take the sovereign power to “make live and let

9
Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 9.
10
Ibid., 10.
die” into their own hands. Similarly, I want to analyze how the rendering of statelessness

through denationalization when it results in banishment, but also practices of internment that

have been preceded by the stripping of citizenship such as that of Japanese-Americans during

WWII call for a reconsideration of Foucault’s distinction between “the suspension of rights”

taken to form the economy of contemporary modern forms of punishment and the “art of

unbearable sensations” taken to characterize pre-modern punishment.

I envision that this chapter will begin with a theoretical treatment of banishment and exile

as a particular form of punishment through a reading of its invocation as a sovereign form of

governance in ancient and modern political thought before turning to consider whether it is a

corporeal and or non-corporeal punishment based on Foucault’s reading of humane systems of

punishment as a hallmark of modern penal systems. Then, I will consider how we can broaden

our notion of what it means to “punish” outside of a strictly penal context by arguing that

citizenship deprivation in the Euro-American context specifically as it was used as a means of

population and racial management as well as the practice of “internal exile” as it was used during

WWII to deprive Japanese American’s of citizenship when their allegiance to the U.S. was

questioned. In order to more fully theorize the relationship between corporeality, the practice of

citizenship revocation, statelessness, and punishment, I also want to turn to the practice of

punishing fugitive slaves in the ante-bellum American south. Taken together, the turn to

corporealizing the punishment of banishment and locating it within the broader context of

immigration control and racialized presumptions concerning citizen loyalty challenges recent

scholarship that in the Arendtian formulation locate or assume that denationalization is a

totalitarian form of punishment that is divorced from the broader politics of immigration control
and the regulation of mobility that inheres within democratic practices of exclusion through

citizenship regulation and management.

Chapter 2 – Statelessness and the Semitic Question

In this chapter, I turn to what Joseph Massad refers to as the “Semitic question” as a way

to theorize the relationship between the practice of denationalization, contemporary forms of

statelessness, and the role of the politicization of Islam in the rhetoric concerning the “war on

terror,” that justifies state practices of expulsion and internal exile. Both in international NGO

circles as well as in academic treatments of statelessness, the link between discrimination and

statelessness is noted as an empirical fact about the phenomenon. According to these studies,

most of the world’s stateless population are ethnic minorities. However, another empirical facet

of contemporary forms of statelessness is seldom acknowledged and has not been fully theorized.

In most contemporary forms of statelessness, from the revival of denationalization as a means to

address the issue of Islamic State returnees, the statelessness of Myanmar’s Rohingya, the threat

of statelessness faced by China’s Uighur population as well as those in Assam in the example

with which I began, the stateless groups are Muslim minorities. I aim in this chapter to argue that

discrimination is not just a cause of statelessness as it is treated in the literature, but that

statelessness is itself an ascriptive category that characterizes the racial category of the

“Semitic.” As an ascriptive marker, the idea that certain groups are always already stateless

despite being citizens is exemplified by the denationalization of Europe’s Jewish minority

population during the twentieth century, who according to Arendt, had racialized perceptions of

their lack of a homeland made concrete through the rendering of them as stateless people. More

recently, Islam in the context of the war on terror is racialized in that those who are thought to

profess an Islamic faith are held to be nation-less in the sense that their faith is thought to bind
them to the broader pan-Islamic Ummah rather than the specific states in which they reside. I

will also argue that the ascribing of an innate stateless condition to the category of the Semitic

that then becomes the grounds for a state-based ideology of Islamophobia that threatens to undo

the citizenship of Muslim minorities complicates the binary distinction between in situ forms of

statelessness and those forms of statelessness that are experienced as displacement.

Arendt’s reflections on the formation of anti-Semitism in Europe during the twentieth

century are instructive for capturing what Joseph Massad claims is the relational quality of the

category of the Semite, in which the construction of Semitism is a ruse for the self-construction

of the majority population. According to him, “Semitism, therefore, is always relational to

Europeanism as Aryanism.”11 But more importantly for Massad, the racialized construction of

the Semite is constitutive of anti-Semitism, since anti-Semites themselves relied on the

construction of the Semitic other as a means to delineate their racial superiority. 12 In Arendt’s

treatment of the pan-movements of Europe, specifically the pan-Slavic and pan-Germanic

movements that sought out imperial control of the continent, Jewishness and Semitism was a

threat to their ideology because these movements “claim to chosenness” as Arendt puts it could

only clash with “the Jewish claim.” It is for this reason that Arendt claims that anti-Semitism is

bound up with envy. This diagnosis of anti-Semitism in relation to the twentieth century

European pan-national movements is instructive for theorizing the link between what many have

claimed characterizes our contemporary political moment as being marked by far-right

nationalist movements that blend ethnic nativism with populism and these politicians’ invocation

of the Muslim question as a putative threat to the stability of the political community.

11
Massad, Islam in Liberalism, 316.
12
Ibid., 318.
 In addition to examining the connection between the Muslim question, contemporary

forms of anti-Semitism that take the form of Islamophobia, and rendering of minority groups

stateless by right-wing nationalist governments, I also hope to diagnose the relative silence on

the link between religion and statelessness in our contemporary moment. Scholarship on the

stateless issue, while drawing heavily upon Arendt’s reflections on the issue as it related to

twentieth century anti-Semitism, has yet to theorize the link between the Semitic question and

statelessness. I will argue that this is due in part to an anthropological construction of religion as

a operating and existing at the level of a “belief-system” that fails to link religion to an racialized

and embodied taxonomy that is operative in the Euro-American context in which discourses

regarding the fundamental incompatibility of secular and democratic values with Islam are

operative. By theorizing the link between the secular and ascriptive statelessness, I hope to

further the overall argument of this dissertation project that rather than being the anti-thesis of

citizenship, statelessness is constitutive of the legal institution of granting and withholding

membership based on the extension of citizenship to some and the revocation of citizenship from

others. Islam in our contemporary moment is deemed to be incompatible with membership in

secular democratic societies, such that the rendering of Muslim minorities as stateless individuals

is to make concrete this incompatibility.

Chapter 3 – Statelessness and Post-Colonial Citizenship

Oftentimes, the solution proposed for ending statelessness is the extension of citizenship

and membership rights within a sovereign state. This solution is often premised on Arendt’s

claim that the stateless lack the right to have rights due to the lack of legal enforceability of

human rights claims. In the contemporary scholarship on stateless, many have noted that

Arendt’s reflections on the right to have rights are no longer relevant in an era of justiciable
human rights norms. For example, the legal scholar of citizenship, Linda Bosniak notes that so-

called “illegal immigrants” and other non-nationals in the U.S. have legal standing on par with

U.S. citizens before the law, a claim that some might find initially surprising until one notes that

non-citizens are entitled to fundamental due process rights and rights of legal representation. The

rights that they lack, according to Bosniak, are those that we commonly associate with political

enfranchisement such as voting, holding office, and exercising political voice. This legal fact

concerning the status of non-nationals before the law leads Bosniak to conclude that the

characterization of stateless people as “bare life” and lacking the right to have rights does not

hold up upon further empirical scrutiny.

In this chapter, I further complicate the notion that the extension of nationality is both a

solution to the problem of statelessness, but also that statelessness is a condition of abjection that

needs to be resolved. In the context of settler colonial practices, the imposition of an alien

citizenship is an effort to remedy what is taken to be the lack of functioning statehood of an

indigenous population, who in many instances have rejected the assimilative logic of the full

granting of citizenship rights. In order to theorize alternative conceptions of statelessness as they

were experience in the post-colonial context, I will turn to post-colonial and Black nationalist

thinkers who attempted to think beyond the full granting of citizenship and the imposition of

statehood as a means to secure legitimate political freedom in post-colonial contexts. According

to Adom Getachew, for example, Marcus Garvey conceived of the African plight as analogous to

the plight of the stateless peoples of Europe. According to Getachew, “Garvey’s Negro

government did not offer a fully developed institutional account of how black self-government

might govern and protect a far-flung diaspora. However, at its center was the view that the

injustices and rights violations that blacks faced could not be disconnected from their collective
position as stateless people.” (My emphasis)13 For Getachew, the struggle for a Black homeland

akin to that of a Jewish homeland was envisioned as a solution for Black thinkers who

subscribed to what she terms is the “empire-as-slavery thesis.” On my reading, the invocation of

slavery in the Americas as a way to contextualize imperial domination further connects the issue

of a lack of personhood at the center of the stateless rendering of slaves with the statelessness of

those subject to imperial rule that are thought to be exploitable because they lack a homeland. I

aim in this chapter to more fully explicate Garvey’s thesis of black statelessness by returning to

his writings on the prospect of a pan-African homeland. In doing so, I will argue that the

extension of citizenship as a solution to the stateless issue belies the extent to which groups who

were stateless in the post-colonial context sought to refashion indigenous and particularized

forms of citizenship rather than appropriate the citizenship regimes of already existing sovereign

states that failed to recognize their personhood.

Another post-colonial figure who specifically rejected state-based legal recognition as a

solution to the post-colonial lack of sovereign nationhood was Gandhi. According to Karuna

Mantena, Gandhi’s ideal post-colonial vision for Indian self-determination was in a sense

statelessness. Instead of the state, Gandhi envisioned a federative order based on the pre-colonial

Indian village system. Gandhian anti-statism was premised on the idea that as a modern entity,

the state was inextricably bound up with a bureaucratic machinery of violence. Thus, to replace

colonial rule with a state-based framework for India as others had suggested would lead to what

Gandhi termed was “English rule without the Englishmen.” A federative village system could

feasibly replace the state and constitute what Mantena terms was “an autonomous social.” My

aim in this chapter is to more fully flesh out what Gandhi’s conception of an autonomous social

and his rejection of statehood suggests about the taken for granted connection between a lack of
13
Getachew, Worldmaking after Empire, 96.
rights guaranteed through the institution of citizenship and the lack of recognition that neo-

Hegelian scholars such as Axel Honneth claim is essential for individual dignity and self-respect.

In turning to Gandhian anti-statism in dialogue with a Black nationalist understanding of the

solution to Black statelessness as residing in African nationhood, I want to further complicate the

relationship between statehood, statelessness, and the presumed resolution to the stateless issue

through the granting of formal citizenship rights.