Hannah Arendt's writings from the 1940s about the situation of stateless persons are at once vividly concrete and theoretically sweeping. They relate the precarious texture of refugee life to a powerful critique of the modern system of nation-states, which has always purported to suture together citizenship, territory, and nationality without remainder, and which has always failed to do so, perhaps most conspicuously after world wars and other global crises. Ayten Gündoğdu is not the first political theorist to look to Arendt to help make sense of the “contemporary struggles of migrants”—these writings have enjoyed a continuous renaissance since the end of the Cold War—but Gündoğdu's book is admirably distinctive in its questions, its readings, and its arguments. Sure-handedly combining theoretical analysis, textual interpretation, and attention to the realities of border checkpoints, detention centers, refugee camps, and courtrooms, Gündoğdu manages the difficult feat of throwing light on the world while (and by) saying something surprising and persuasive about Arendt's political thought.
As Gündoğdu shows, in parsing the situation of stateless persons as a violation of the one genuine human right—the “right to have rights,” or to belong to some organized political body that could establish and protect the rights of its citizens—Arendt was walking a fine line, criticizing the then institutionally impotent Universal Declaration of Human Rights for its “lack of reality,” but also refusing to give up altogether on the idea of a rights-claim that could reach beyond the world as it is (6). Much recent discussion of Arendt's idea of a “right to have rights” has centered on the question of how such a right might be institutionalized, and especially on the question of whether Arendt provides, or needs to provide, philosophical grounds for this fundamental rights-claim. Gündoğdu mostly leaves these debates aside. Instead, reflecting on the institutional heft that the idea of human rights has already taken on in the decades since 1948, including the codification of the right to asylum, the foundation of the European Court of Human Rights, and the expansion of international humanitarian relief activity, Gündoğdu asks what Arendt might still have to teach us in our current “age of rights.” One answer is that because these institutions do not fundamentally change the organization of the international system around the idea of the nation-state, they may remediate some of the most egregious abuses to which noncitizens are subject, such as mass expulsion, but in doing so they also help reproduce an international culture in which statelessness is wrongly regarded as an “unwelcome yet anomalous condition” (11), as it also was, for other reasons, at the high-water mark of nation-state ideology. Another answer is that these institutions protect rights (when they do) by depoliticizing them, obscuring the political work that went into those institutions and which is still necessary to sustain them, and treating rights themselves as means to private enjoyments but not also as the enabling conditions of political action.
These two answers come together in the book's third and central chapter, which focuses on the postwar development of legal constraints on deportation and detention, and on two recent European Court of Human Rights cases that tested the strength of those constraints. Gündoğdu's argument here is subtle. On the one hand, she suggests that these cases testify to the continued arbitrary power of territorial states over the fates of noncitizens, though that power is now cloaked in the forms of administrative regularity and in a “compassionate humanitarianism” that turns out itself to be “capricious” (113). On the other hand, she also brilliantly shows that, even where these new human rights norms do limit state discretion, they do so on the grounds of a responsiveness to “suffering bodies” (112) that positions rights-claimants as passive objects of expert administration rather than as political actors—as, for example, in the court's use of a distinction (apparently drawn from the literature on medical ethics) between “ensuring a dignified death” and “prolonging life” to parse the United Kingdom's obligations to an asylum seeker from Uganda. Gündoğdu's argument is hard to classify under professional political theory's familiar rubrics—it is responsive to the problem of arbitrary power central to neo-Roman republican thought, for example, even as it affirms the importance of political action in Arendtian terms from which contemporary neo-Romans are often eager to distance themselves—but insofar as this is the result of Gündoğdu taking her lead from the complicated situation of contemporary refugees, caught between discretionary sovereign power and human rights institutions that protect them by infantilizing or objectifying them, then so much the worse for the rubrics.
As the foregoing suggests, Gündoğdu's use of Arendt extends beyond her writings of the 1940s to encompass The Human Condition and On Revolution, which are among the texts in which Arendt most clearly developed her ideas about the importance of political action and the perils of antipolitical modes of governance. Yet Gündoğdu does not simply reiterate familiar readings of these texts organized around oppositions between “action” (good) and “labor” or “work” (bad), or between properly “political” or “public” matters and things that are only of “social” or “private” concern. Instead, she offers a striking and important reading of the value of all three of the activities Arendt associates with the vita activa, which in turn informs a brilliant account of the several layers of existential disruption experienced by migrants confined to refugee camps. Gündoğdu also argues persuasively that when Arendt calls something a “social” question, she means only that the prevailing mode of collective engagement with that question treats it as a “matte[r] of collective housekeeping to be handled by bureaucratic structures of governance,” but not that the same question could not be politicized (66). These are important interpretative accomplishments in their own right and deserve wide attention.
Naturally, the book broaches some questions it does not answer. Gündoğdu briefly notes “the recent move to privatize immigration detention in many countries”—her cited source reports that almost half of all beds in American detention facilities are now privately controlled—but given the family resemblance between her critique of existing migration regimes and older traditions of critique of the objectifying and depoliticizing effects of the postwar welfare state, more systematic attention to the effects of neoliberal retrenchment on migrants' experiences both of sovereign state power and of human rights institutions would have been welcome. Likewise, I wondered how far Gündoğdu would take her revisionist readings of Arendt, and in particular whether, on her interpretation, (even!) attention to the suffering body could be politicized in Arendt's sense: at times Gündoğdu seems to press in this direction; but late in the book, her understandable caution about the political potential of “lip-sewing” as a mode of protest in refugee camps (160), combined with her enthusiastic treatment of sans-papiers' use of the more familiar mode of the written declaration, seem to imply a more conventionally “Arendtian” worry about the appearance of the suffering body in public, though she does not quite confront this question head-on. But these are not so much complaints as samples of the further conversations that this already extremely accomplished book is bound to provoke.
