Are Hannah Arendt’s philosophical inquires about the perplexities of human rights in the first half of the twentieth century relevant to our understanding of the problems of contemporary migrants? Is Arendt’s observation that the stateless find themselves in a fundamental situation of rightlessness valid in a time when legal personhood replaces citizenship as the basis of the entitlement to rights? Ayten Gündoğdu argues that Arendt’s ideas are indeed applicable in our times.
Writing after the horrific events of World War II, Arendt criticized the failure of the world to confront the fundamental condition of rightlessness endured by those who were deprived of their citizenship. Human rights relied on membership in an organized political community. “The Rights of Man,” which were considered natural, inalienable, and independent of political membership, were unenforceable for those who were stateless. The contemporary reconfiguration of sovereignty, citizenship, and rights is extensive. As a result, migrants can now lay claim to many of the civil, social, and cultural rights that were formerly associated with citizenship. Indeed, Gündoğdu maintains that those changes have resolved many, but not all, of the pervasive problems encountered by different categories of migrants. I concur with her claim that rereading and reinterpreting Arendt’s analysis is crucial for revealing the complexities in the existing human rights framework.
In line with the book’s structure, I shall begin by highlighting a couple of the many insights Gündoğdu offers on Arendt’s political philosophy that are particularly significant for the understanding of human rights norms and practices today. First, according to Gündoğdu, Arendt’s critical thinking is aporetic, with no final closure. The task is neither to find a new normative foundation for human rights nor to devise an institutional model for their protection. By critically assessing contemporary political and ethical dilemmas in rightlessness, she calls into question existing norms, values, and criteria about human rights, trying to make this concept meaningful again. Second, according to the author, Arendt presents the equivocality and contingency of human rights. The 1789 “Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen” simultaneously emancipated man, called into question all social privileges, and provided the protection of rights; at the same time, it identified “man” with “the citizen,” thus creating the problems of statelessness and rightlessness. In assessing the many migrants in a condition of rightlessness today, one should pay attention to those observations.
Gündoğdu’s analysis, however, is not limited to focusing on Arendt’s insights on the contemporary problems of asylum seekers, refugees, and undocumented immigrants. The author also reinterprets some of Arendt’s key concepts and arguments in light of the hurdles faced by these people. For example, in contrast to customary readings of Arendt’s political theory, Gündoğdu suggests a rethinking of the way that Arendt distinguishes between the “political” and the “social,” arguing that a clear-cut political/social distinction cannot be upheld, given that most human rights problems breach that boundary. Instead, we should carefully examine the ways in which the social enables or hinders possibilities of politicizing challenging problems of rightlessness.
Gündoğdu claims that Arendt’s analysis might have dealt with different legal, political, and normative circumstances than our own, but rightlessness has not been eradicated. In support of the author’s thesis, I can add that on June 20, 2014, the United Nations refugee agency reported that the number of refugees, asylum seekers, and internally displaced people worldwide has, for the first time in the post—World War II era, exceeded 50 million people. However, the differences and similarities are not just quantitative but qualitative. At the time Arendt wrote her analysis, rightlessness meant a total absence of any international legal recognition. Gündoğdu acknowledges that post—World War II legal developments guarantee some legal protection for asylum seekers and migrants. But she also insists that those formal guarantees are fragile and can be set aside. Rightlessness today exposes the precarious and vulnerable legal, political, and human standing of migrants that persists even in the face of human rights declarations.
Gündoğdu discusses four such groups and analyzes their conditions in light of Arendt’s political philosophy: expelled aliens, detained migrants, refugees in refugee camps, and undocumented immigrants. In the next few paragraphs, I attempt to present her key arguments regarding those issues.
Nation-states have always used deportation to exclude those deemed undesirable from the political community. The rise of human rights norms after World War II, and the international conventions and treaties that attempted to secure them, curtailed the discretionary power of sovereign states to perpetrate arbitrary physical expulsions. However, even the principle of non-refoulement (that forbids the expulsion of refugees to any country in which they might be subject to persecution) has an exception clause, and states can execute deportation orders in cases of apparent threat to national security or public order. Accordingly, in 2008, the European Court of Human Rights affirmed the sovereign power of the United Kingdom to refuse asylum for an HIV-diagnosed asylum seeker from Uganda. Like the stateless in Arendt’s analysis, asylum seekers today are dependent on the unpredictable sentiments of others.
Since the 1990s, detention has been normalized as a legitimate tool for immigration control. Asylum seekers, undocumented immigrants, and noncitizens waiting for deportation are routinely detained in detention sites, which may resemble the internment camps used to hold the stateless. Although international conventions forbid states from imposing penalties on account of unauthorized entry or presence, such detentions have been legitimized by the European Court of Human Rights for administrative convenience and expediency. As in deportations, some of the clauses in international human rights law erode the personhood of migrants.
Despite the significant developments in the field of international human rights, camps remain the primary solution for refugees (under the anticipated but incorrect assumption that this condition is temporary). Corresponding to Arendt’s analysis, refugee camps are spaces that prevent the conduct of the fundamental human activities of action, work, and labor: “They undermine the possibilities of engaging in familiar routines of life (labor), establishing a reliable and durable dwelling place (work), and creating public spaces where one can act and speak in the presence of others (action)” (p. 141).
Lastly, Gündoğdu explores the condition of undocumented immigrants by examining the mobilization of the sans-papiers since the 1990s in France. As irregulars, they were not entitled to claim rights or even be heard. Nevertheless, those activists refused to be passive victims and contested publicly their condition of rightlessness. Their presence defied social and political norms in several ways. Like Arendt’s description of eighteenth-century revolutionaries, they were subjects who claimed rights that they were not yet allowed to claim, and thus challenged the official identities rendering them speechless. They demanded regularization and residence outside the scope of the existing framework of human right laws. And they challenged the boundaries of French national identity by mobilizing around symbols of the French Revolution.
One of the most captivating observations in the book is the notion of the perpetual perplexities of human action, and, in particular, that of human rights. Practices, norms, conditions, and events can simultaneously have multiple meanings and even contradictory effects on our lives. The existing framework of human rights laws upholds the principle of territorial sovereignty and even legitimizes it, and at the same time, it is a novel development that curtails the unconditional autonomy of the state and enables noncitizens to have standing before the law and make claims to rights. Although not explicitly mentioned in the book, this tension is highlighted through a look at the abovementioned activities of the sans-papiers. Although they demanded recognition that opposed the national framework and the moral universalism underlying it, their desire was not to replace it but to be incorporated into it. Moreover, we can see that although undocumented immigrants’ demonstrations ignited the debates on undocumented immigrants, it was the pressure by French citizens that ultimately impacted policies.
Gündoğdu is correct to maintain that rather than advocating a political and normative vision, as scholars we should continue to critically examine the perplexities of global politics: “A critical thinking that is attuned to perplexities is promising in this regard precisely because it questions an evolutionary understanding of human rights without subscribing to a totalizing critique that suggests that human rights inevitably lead to nothing other than suffering and violence because of their inextricable connection to sovereign power” (p. 211). The author acknowledges that there have been significant changes in the logic that organizes the world into distinct nation-states. Human rights are not limited to national citizens in the manner presented by Arendt. Nevertheless, at times—like in the analysis of the sans-papiers—she overlooks the importance of national logic as the world’s organizing principle, and that the demise of this principle is not expected in the near future.
Gündoğdu meticulously examines the underlying philosophical assumptions in Arendt’s work on the perplexities of human rights and their appropriateness to the twenty-first century. Yet while the stated goal is to examine contemporary struggles of migrants in relation to Arendt’s philosophical thinking, I felt that that manuscript gave considerably more attention to the latter than to the analysis of the former. Gündoğdu presents us with many insights into Arendt’s work, many more than could be described in this short review. As the book is theoretical and not empirically driven, at times, those philosophical inquiries supersede a robust examination of numerous additional occurrences of rightlessness in our contemporary age of rights, for example: refugees not in refugee camps, including internal refugees; guestworkers; human trafficking; convicts who are stripped of many civil and political rights; and other ethnic or national minorities. Conversely, the cases that are dealt with are not systematically analyzed.
If there are any shortcomings in this book, they are mainly connected to disciplinary sensitivities rather than to substance. For, in Rightlessness in an Age of Rights, Gündoğdu has furnished an important account of the normative perplexities associated with political efforts to address the problem of rightlessness in our times.
