The Specter of Statelessness

• In Event: Political Theories of Resistance

Abstract

Political theorists often appeal to the dangers of statelessness to justify acquiescence to state injustice. To avoid the “state of nature,” they say, we must establish states, obey them, and help maintain their power—even if they are not fully just. That is, they invoke the specter of statelessness to justify a general obligation to obey and maintain the state. But rarely do these invocations consider the condition of actually stateless people. If a state’s citizens may obey it and bolster its power—even if it sometimes wields that power unjustly—to lessen their already minuscule risk of statelessness, what may actually stateless people do to oppose the systems that make them so? With this in mind, here I aim to re-center stateless people to generate a new perspective on the ethics of resistance. I propose that we see statelessness as a product of the state system. Moreover, the state system maintains itself (at least in part) by channeling political activity through statist institutions, thus reinforcing the impression that states should be the world’s primary political authorities. If, as I argue, statelessness is a product of the state system and the state system maintains itself by channeling political activity through statist institutions, then we cannot remedy the disenfranchisement and injustice stateless people face via statist institutions. I conclude that, far from recommending obedience to or exaltation of the state as a political form, understanding the dangers of statelessness—including the ways in which they are produced and reproduced by the state system itself—recommends some amount of resistance against the state system. In essence, statelessness as it occurs in our world is a product of state power, not of its absence. Therefore, the remedy is not more state power, but the development of alternate channels by which stateless people can secure for themselves the important goods the state system denies them.

Author

• Lucia M. Rafanelli, George Washington University