Hannah Arendt's work, Origins of Totalitarianism Footnote ¹, questions the “irony between regarding human rights as inalienable, enjoyed only by citizens, and the situation of those without rights.”Footnote ² In her book Gündoğdu views the conditions of migrants and stateless persons through the lens of Hannah Arendt, by pointing to the paradoxes in the international human rights framework. She sets out key points of “rightlessness” by explaining the precarious legal, political and human standing of refugees and stateless persons (p.3), by discussing the ongoing theoretical manifestations of rightlessness by examining aspects of legal personhood, territorial sovereignty and the oft-critiqued universality of human rights.

Arendt, in Origins of Totalitarianism, wrote about the human rights conditions of stateless persons and refugees in the aftermath of the Second World War, among other aspects of post-war political climate of Europe. Since Arendt's work was published, developments have been noticeable in the conception of human rights and their application. However, despite such “progressive” steps, we continue to witness refugees’ difficulty in accessing human rights, which places this book in a fairly contemporary light.

Gündoğdu's analysis turns attention to a critical re-reading of Arendt's insights on Socratic thinking. She provides an exegesis by illustrating Arendt's interest in Socrates which she contends arises from Arendt's preoccupation with the dangers of non-thinking (p.29). Gündoğdu explains that Arendt was concerned about the dangers of people's inability to critically examine commonly held beliefs, values and standards, which could result in submissive obedience to rules. She invests some time analyzing the idea of non-thinking which is tangential to her focus on rightlessness of refugees and migrants. Here she explains the dismantling of multiethnic empires and the advent of nation states, the purposes of which were to create a homogenous space for each national group. The ‘non-thinking application’ of this cardinal principle, she argues, resulted in the ejection of many from new nation states causing statelessness (p.31). While it is an interesting explanation to causes of statelessness, the derivation from Socratic idea of perils of thinking, to the end of multiethnic empires to advent of nation states to statelessness, is needlessly complicated.

Gündoğdu contends that Arendt repetitively makes references to rightlessness while writing about statelessness which describes how the loss of citizenship was accompanied by the loss of human rights. She goes on further to argue that the characterizations associated with references that Arendt made to rightlessness were far from obvious in that they did not aim to capture specific violations of rights, but rather depicted a condition that can strip an individual of the rights that he or she formally has (p.94). Gündoğdu makes references to Judith Butler's de-subjectivities associated with refugees and migrants which amounts to rendering them as non-subjects (p.127), and argues that encampment and detention risk rendering refugees “humanly unrecognizable” by reducing them to “worldless specimens of the species mankind” (p.142). She describes rightlessness to be a fundamental condition that makes claiming and exercising of rights very problematic (p.163).

While Gündoğdu's work provides a critical examination of Arendt's work on human rights theory and rightlessness, the book problematizes the Arendtian perspective further by taking readers through a range of theoretical perspectives. Gündoğdu's characterization of refugees and stateless persons is quite striking, when she argues that denial of access to law exemplifies the unmaking of legal personhood. The book while offering a cogent restatement of Arendt's analysis of human rights and a re-examination of temporal uncertainties of detention, deportation, and encampment of refugees, does so with very minimal empirical perspectives. Aside from a few references to refugee camps in Kenya, Gündoğdu's analysis could have been further strengthened by including perspectives from situations of encampment that have occurred throughout the 20^th century. While a post-WWII perspective on rightlessness may still be applicable today, in this book Gündoğdu could have taken readers to a different understanding of Arendt's thesis by incorporating the viewpoints on the UN's Refugee Convention and Statelessness Conventions that have been implemented since then.

Arendt wrote Origins of Totalitarianism when the Second World War had ended and the questions of human rights were becoming more noticeable. She profoundly engaged in her subjective experiences of the Holocaust, which is reflected in her critical perception of rights not only in Origins but many of her other works. However, since Arendt's work was published, both academic and moral perception of rights have changed, with progress being made towards their institutionalization. Gündoğdu engages in her work without cognizance to the existence of international frameworks that ensure protection of refugees more specifically by acknowledging or critiquing the 1951 Refugee Convention, 1954 and 1961 Statelessness Conventions.

Gündoğdu's work has not provided us new insights into our perception of rights, by relating the theoretical perspectives of rightlessness to documented refugee situations. By emphasizing more on contemporary subjectivities, like Judith Butler or Seyla Benhabib did in their works, Gündoğdu could have provided a better foundation for our understanding of refugee rights; elucidating some global transformations in the rights rhetoric, could have made for a more nuanced analysis of Arendt's work. Gündoğdu's work perpetuates the examination of human rights and rightlessness offered to us by Arendt's internalization of her experiences under the Nazi regime in Germany, rather than enabling the readers to enter a new dimension of understanding this subject.

Struggles for migrants’ rights worldwide have now highlighted the significance of establishing the universality of human rights and also reinvented “citizenship in the face of global transformations that dilute it” (p.212). The approach adopted by Gündoğdu in this book emphasizes the significance of mitigating the issues of precariousness associated with those who are excluded from a political community. On the other hand, her characterizations of migrant rights in this book show the international community's failure to accommodate the assumed universality of human rights. Gündoğdu's work can provide interesting insights on how Arendt's idea of a “right to have rights” might be institutionalized which may take us a step closer to realizing ‘universality’. Being a purely theoretical work, this book would appeal to researchers and academics working on political and legal theory of human rights, refugee rights and rights of stateless persons. The book provides some insights into how discussions on rights could be broached as a part of a larger research project.