Journal of Global Ethics

ISSN: 1744-9626 (Print) 1744-9634 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjge20

The neglected non-citizen: statelessness and

liberal political theory

Kristy A. Belton

To cite this article: Kristy A. Belton (2011) The neglected non-citizen: statelessness and liberal
political theory, Journal of Global Ethics, 7:1, 59-71, DOI: 10.1080/17449626.2011.558733

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449626.2011.558733

Published online: 15 Apr 2011.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 776

View related articles

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rjge20

Download by: [Ryerson University Library] Date: 04 June 2016, At: 14:33
 Journal of Global Ethics
Vol. 7, No. 1, April 2011, 59–71

The neglected non-citizen: statelessness and liberal political theory

Kristy A. Belton∗

Department of Political Science, University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT, USA

The non-citizen is the new ‘other’. From popular discourse to political pronouncements and
academic research, the non-citizen has become one of the subjects du jour. Among the ranks
of the non-citizen, one finds a lesser-known category of people which has yet to be considered
seriously by liberal political theory – the stateless. Thus far, liberal political theory has either
ignored this category of persons or subsumed them under the subjects of immigration or
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

refugeehood. The present article challenges this theoretical exclusion in two ways. First, it
analyses the treatment of statelessness within the works of three prominent theorists on just
membership – Michael Walzer, Seyla Benhabib and William Barbieri, Jr – and contends
that these authors ignore the stateless as a unique category of non-citizen. Secondly, it
explains why statelessness demands a distinct theoretical framework than is currently
provided for within liberal political theory. The article contends that just membership
questions necessitate not simply looking at who is let in and what naturalization procedures
should be extended to them, but also entails examining who has always been on the inside
and to whom we need to justify their continued exclusion.
Keywords: Barbieri; Benhabib; human rights; non-citizen; statelessness; Walzer

Non-citizens are the new ‘other’. From popular discourse to political pronouncements and
academic research, non-citizens have become one of the subjects du jour. They may be refugees,
illegal immigrants, permanent residents or migrant workers, but the overriding feature is that
they are not citizens of our polity. They come from somewhere else. Hence, much recent
scholarship within liberal political theory focuses on what membership means in the face of
immigration, refugee flows and global poverty (Benhabib 2004; Bosniak 2006; Cole 2000;
Gibney 2004; Pogge 2008). Many prominent theorists have attempted to answer questions of
who should belong and how, and to what extent present members should have the right to
limit ‘others’ from becoming members of their polity (Barbieri 1998; Benhabib 2004; Carens
1987/2008; Walzer 1983). The majority of these theorists are outward looking, however.
They seek to explain how the non-citizen outsider should be incorporated into the polity, if at all.
Among the ranks of the non-citizen, one finds a lesser-known category of people that has yet
to be considered seriously by liberal political theory – the stateless. The stateless are the arche-
typal non-citizens. Unlike immigrants, and most refugees and asylum-seekers, they are not
recognized as nationals ‘by any State under the operation of its law’ (UNHCR 1954). They
span the globe and their numbers are in the millions (Lynch and Cook 2006; UNHCR
2009a). While immigrants can return to their state of nationality, and refugees are covered by
an extensive system of international law and protection, the stateless have no state to which
to ‘return’ and no comprehensive system of international law and protection to safeguard
them. They are the non-citizen insider.
Because of their non-immigrant, but archetypal non-citizen status, the stateless demand a
distinct place within liberal theorizing on just membership. Thus far, liberal political theory

∗
Email: [email protected]

ISSN 1744-9626 print/ISSN 1744-9634 online

# 2011 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/17449626.2011.558733
http://www.informaworld.com
 60 K.A. Belton

has either ignored this category of persons or subsumed them under the subjects of immigration
or refugeehood. It has consequently translated the invisibility and exclusion of the stateless
within the polity into the realm of theory. The present article challenges this theoretical
exclusion in two ways: it examines the weaknesses in the works of three prominent theorists
on global justice and membership – Michael Walzer, Seyla Benhabib and William Barbieri,
Jr – and it provides reasons why statelessness demands a distinct theoretical framework than
is currently provided within liberal political theory.
In order to support these arguments, the paper is divided into four sections. Section 1 differ-
entiates stateless people from refugees and other types of non-citizens. It also examines the
international legal context for a right to a nationality1 and establishes why statelessness is a
question of global justice. Section 2 explores insights from the works of Walzer, Benhabib
and Barbieri that can be incorporated into a theoretical framework on statelessness. Section 3
then explains the limits of these three theorists’ accounts of global justice and membership,
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

while the final section concludes with suggestions as to how future theorizing on statelessness
might proceed within liberal political theory.

1. Situating the subject

Stateless people and refugees are distinct categories of non-citizens. International law defines
de jure stateless people as those who are not recognized as nationals by any state under the
operation of its law (Article 1, 1954 Convention relating to the Status of Stateless People).
De facto stateless people, on the other hand, are often described as those who hold an ineffective
nationality (Batchelor 1998; Lynch 2005; Manly 2007). They allegedly fall under the purview
of a state’s nationality law, but this state does not offer them basic rights or protections. Their
political membership is often just as contested, and their status just as vulnerable as that of
the internationally recognized de jure stateless person (Belton 2010).2 Refugees, on the other
hand, are distinguished from the stateless in that they cross an international border as they
flee persecution. The stateless are not necessarily persecuted, although they may be discrimi-
nated against, and they typically remain within the state where they were born and reside.
Stateless people and refugees not only share a vulnerable position in relation to membership
in a given state, but they also share other similarities. The literature on refugees is replete
with descriptions of refugees as ‘nameless’, ‘voiceless’, ‘undesirable’, ‘pariahs’ who are
without protection (Agier 2008) – descriptions found in the works on statelessness as well
(Blitz 2006; UNHCR and Interparliamentary Union 2005). Similarly, just as the definition of
‘stateless’ is contested (van Waas 2008), so is that of ‘refugee’ (Black 2001; Haddad 2008),
and the granting of either status to a person has political and legal implications. Additionally,
stateless people, like refugees, typically live on the margins of society. They face multiple
security concerns: threat of forced movement and property confiscation, indefinite detention,
compulsory labour, susceptibility to preventable disease and abject poverty, among others
(Lynch 2005; Sokoloff 2005).
In fact, almost every right enumerated in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
(UDHR [United Nations 1948]) – from the right to a nationality (Article 15) to various civil,
political, social and economic rights – is violated when one is stateless. It is the realization
that citizenship is vital for a person’s ability to live in a dignified manner that led Hannah
Arendt to observe that ‘[t]he Rights of Man, supposedly inalienable, proved to be unenforceable
. . . whenever people appeared who were no longer citizens of any sovereign state’ (Arendt 1968,
293). Former Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren echoed this sentiment in Trop v. Dulles (1958)
when he declared that ‘[c]itizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to
have rights’.
 Journal of Global Ethics 61

Despite the precarious situation in which many stateless people live, the international
community has yet to place the same emphasis on the stateless that they do on refugees. The
international legal regime for refugees is far more developed and many more states are party
to the Convention relating to the Status of Refugees (UNHCR 1951) than are party to the two
statelessness conventions combined. For example, while 144 states are party to the Refugee
Convention, only 65 states and 37 states are party to the 1954 Convention relating to the
Status of Stateless Persons and the 1961 Convention on the Reduction of Statelessness,
respectively (UNHCR 2009b, 2009c). Additionally, while the UNHCR is placing increasing
emphasis on its second mandate of protecting stateless people, it admits that it has simply not
been ‘doing enough’ in this area (Leclerc 2007). Beyond the UNHCR’s emphasis on refugees,
the United Nations in general has a tendency to subsume considerations of statelessness into
refugee concerns. Statelessness is viewed as a potential source of refugee flows (UNHCR
2004), but in and of itself is rarely a priority.
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

The danger in subsuming the stateless within refugee concerns is that it ignores the precar-
ious situation in which these people live within the states where they were born and reside. Their
situation is just as troubling as that of refugees, perhaps even more so when one considers the
little attention they receive in policy circles and the invisibility that generally attaches to their
status because they are not typically international border-crossers. This lack of border crossing
is what distinguishes them from refugees and all other types of non-citizens. They are not
external outsiders seeking admittance, but internal outsiders seeking political inclusion. They
demand that we not look across, or fixate upon, borders to understand the problem of exclusion
and membership, but that we look within the body politic instead – for ‘it is for each State to
determine under its own laws who are its nationals’ (Article 1, Convention on Certain Questions
relating to the Conflict of Nationality Law 1930).
International law describes citizenship as a status that all should attain via their respective
states. Even before the UDHR asserted each person’s right to a nationality, the 1930 Convention
on Certain Questions relating to the Conflict of Nationality Law established that it was ‘in the
general interest of the international community to secure that all its members should recognize
that every person should have a nationality’ (Preamble). This same convention declared that loss
of citizenship was not permitted unless a person ‘possesses another nationality or unless and
until he acquires another nationality’ (Article 7). The Convention on the Reduction of Stateless-
ness (UNHCR 1961) echoes this position when it states that a person should not lose citizenship
from one state until acquiring the citizenship of another state first (Articles 5 – 7) and that states
should confer their citizenship upon children who would otherwise be stateless (Article 1).
Other international instruments also cite the right to citizenship. The 1965 International
Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination states that citizenship
is a civil right (Article 5). The 1966 International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights declares
the right of every child to acquire a citizenship (Article 24) – an assertion that the 1989
Convention on the Rights of the Child reiterates (Article 7) – and the 1979 Convention on
the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women provides for a woman’s right
to acquire, change and retain citizenship (Article 9).
While these are all examples of international-level recognition that everyone should be able
to acquire, change and pass on citizenship, the international political system as currently con-
strued respects the sovereign right of states to create their own nationality laws and does not
permit any other entity to impose citizenship requirements upon, or make citizenship decisions
for, states. A tension thus exists between the right of membership and the sovereign prerogative
of states to decide who is a citizen. While international law may evolve in such a way that exclu-
sive state control over membership decisions may change (Permanent Court of International
Justice 1923, 23), the enjoyment of rights is still mostly tied to having citizenship from
 62 K.A. Belton

somewhere. Thus, since citizenship status is still crucial to civil and legal recognition and the
rights associated thereof, and since people must be citizens of somewhere, the right to a nation-
ality becomes a question of global justice when millions are denied citizenship.
Statelessness falls within the purview of global justice on several counts. First, it is a
condition that is generated by a coercively imposed political structure. Nagel (2005) observes
that the ‘sovereign state is not just a cooperative enterprise for mutual advantage. The societal
rules determining its basic structure are coercively imposed: it is not a voluntary association’
(128). Although he does not argue that the institution of sovereign states is unjust per se
(119 – 20), one may conclude that it is when he says that ‘[w]e are required to accord equal
status to anyone with whom we are joined in a strong and coercively imposed political commu-
nity’ (133). The global institution of sovereign states, with its current control over membership
matters, is arguably ‘a strong and coercively imposed political community’.
International laws and practices – found in numerous forms of hard and soft law as noted
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

above – create a global system that supports the institution of sovereign states and states’
rights to control membership. The practice of imposing citizenship through birthplace or parent-
age is commonplace among all states (Shachar 2009, 368). It is not a practice that some engage
in and others do not, although it is imperfect in its application – as the presence of roughly 12
million stateless people attests. Neither do these laws and practices support the right of someone
to be voluntarily stateless; as noted earlier, people are supposed to be citizens of somewhere.
Moreover, while some scholars speak of ‘flexible’, ‘postnational’, ‘denationalized’ and
‘disaggregated’ citizenship (Benhabib 2004; Ong 1999; Sassen 2003; Soysal 1998), such
‘mutations’ in citizenship (Ong 2006), and the ‘disaggregated’ and ‘disarticulated’ rights
thereof, rarely apply to the stateless. Even in those instances where a state party to the stateless-
ness conventions provides the stateless with a recognized status, the rights of the stateless in the
areas of association, freedom of movement, residence, work, public assistance, identity and
travel documents are all contingent upon ‘lawful’ residence in the state (Articles 13, 17 – 19,
21, 23– 24, 26 and 28 of the 1954 convention). If a contracting state to the 1954 convention
therefore deems their residence ‘unlawful’, they are under no obligation to provide such
rights to the stateless. Thus, when Aihwa Ong (2006) declares that ‘[b]inary oppositions
between citizenship and statelessness . . . are not useful for thinking about emergent spaces
and novel combinations of globalizing and situated variables’ (499) she is not incorrect, but it
would be a mistake for theorists who explore just membership, or even novel forms of member-
ship à la Ong, to ignore those who have no citizenship from anywhere.
Finally, questions of distributive justice specifically arise when it comes to political member-
ship. Walzer (1983) argues that ‘[t]he theory of distributive justice begins, then, with an account
of membership rights’ because ‘it is only as members somewhere that men and women can hope
to share in all the other social goods’ (63). Shachar (2009) makes a similar claim when she points
out that citizenship in a particular state conditions the opportunities that a person enjoys. She
contends that birthright citizenship, whether acquired through jus soli or jus sanguinis measures,
is akin to a system of inherited property that ‘locks in structures of privilege world-wide . . .
Conceived of as a valuable resource, the benefits associated with inherited citizenship, just
like any other form of property entitlement, become subject to considerations of distributive
justice’ (Shachar 2007, 279 – 80). Statelessness, therefore, is a matter of global justice when
one is supposed to be a member of some state, but is not; and if the only way to acquire member-
ship is through the very polity that denies it to a person; and if myriad rights are placed in
jeopardy because one is a member of no state.
The problem of statelessness thus demands special attention because the stateless come
closest to the dangerous ‘abstract nakedness of being [only] human’, without political bonds
(Arendt 1968, 299). Their presence necessitates a particular inward-looking theoretical
 Journal of Global Ethics 63

framework in comparison to that which examines other non-citizens. In an effort to construct a

liberal political theory of just membership that explicitly includes the stateless, the next section
examines the works of three prominent just membership theorists to discern what contributions
their work could make to such a theory.

2. Current just membership approaches

In Spheres of justice, The rights of others and Ethics of citizenship, Walzer, Benhabib and
Barbieri, respectively, discuss the question of just membership. Although these scholars
approach the subject from distinct perspectives – Walzer from that of a liberal communitarian,
Benhabib from universal personhood, and Barbieri from the human right to non-domination –
all three argue against permanent alienage. They believe that those who reside in a particular
polity, and who are subject to a state’s law, should have a voice in influencing that law.
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

Walzer (1983) describes anything less than the opportunity for citizenship to those whom the
state has already admitted into the country, and who continue to work and reside within it, as
the ‘tyranny’ of the majority (citizens) over the minority (non-citizens) (62). Benhabib (2004)
similarly argues that ‘[p]ermanent alienage is not only incompatible with a liberal-democratic
understanding of human community; it is also a violation of fundamental human rights’
(3 – 4). Barbieri (1998) echoes Walzer’s conception of tyranny when he states that people are
dominated when they desire membership in a polity but are denied this status (137).
Despite their agreement that permanent alienage is problematic for liberal political theory,
Walzer, Benhabib and Barbieri differ in other regards. Walzer seeks to construct a theory that
recognizes the moral equality of all humans while protecting the right of communities to deter-
mine their membership composition. Benhabib recognizes that communities are constantly in
the making and that it is through democratic iterations that membership is redefined. Thus,
whereas Walzer advocates the right of communities to ‘close’ their borders, Benhabib argues
for ‘porous’ borders that grant refugees and asylum seekers ‘first admittance’, but which
remain fairly closed otherwise. Barbieri, on the other hand, seeks to reconstitute liberal political
theory from the perspective of non-domination and a policy of more open borders results. The
three theorists, therefore, rest on a theoretical continuum from mostly closed, to fairly closed/
open, to mostly open membership practices.
Walzer, Benhabib and Barbieri also differ as to whether membership in a polity is a good or a
right. For Walzer, no right to a nationality exists. Membership is the ‘primary good that we
distribute to one another’ through political decision-making (Walzer 1983, 31), but it is not a
universal good. Since Walzer seeks to protect the right of communities to determine their mem-
bership, he cannot allow for a right of nationality as this would infringe upon the community’s
right of self-determination, which Walzer holds prior to the right to belong. Benhabib, in
contrast, envisions not a right to a nationality, but a right of membership generally. In contra-
distinction to Walzer, she takes a human rights approach to the question of just membership
and argues that rights should be decoupled from citizenship so that all people may enjoy
them regardless of political status.
Whereas Benhabib carefully chooses not to analyse membership as a good because she does
not want to argue that the right of membership is a question of distributive justice, Barbieri
(1998) argues that membership is both a good (83, 125) and a human right (115). As opposed
to Walzer, Barbieri argues that it is not a matter of the community or state granting or
denying a right of membership, but a question of people being entitled, as a matter of justice
and of ‘categorical right’ (115) to membership once they have fulfilled temporal residence
and competence qualifications (137). For Barbieri, the human right to non-domination is a
‘first-order’ human right that ‘as a rule deserves priority’ when ‘the right of self-determination
 64 K.A. Belton

of one group comes into conflict with the right to nondomination of a minority or other group’
(135). Walzer would argue the converse: the right of self-determination is a first-order human
right and deserves precedence over claims to citizenship.
Even though Walzer supports the right of communities to self-determination and, hence,
exclusion of non-members, he allows for a right of place in his variant of liberal communitar-
ianism. According to Walzer (1983), ‘The state owes something to its inhabitants simply,
without reference to their nationality. And the first place to which inhabitants are entitled is
surely the place where they and their families have lived and made a life’ (43). This right of
place, however, does not entitle one to political participation or membership generally as it
does in the accounts of Benhabib and Barbieri.
Despite the fact that these authors do not explicitly engage statelessness as a just membership
question, their works provide important insights that could be incorporated into a theory of
global justice dealing with statelessness. Although Walzer (1983) does not consider nationality
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

to be a human right, he believes that ‘statelessness is a condition of infinite danger’ (32) and his
right of place could be used to argue for a right of residence, and the associated rights thereof, for
the stateless. This is especially true when one considers that most stateless people are either born
within the states in which they reside or have lived in that territory for most of their lives. Their
right of place is therefore strong.
Additionally, Walzer argues that it is tyrannical for citizens to prevent non-citizens from ever
having a voice in political matters that affect them. The stateless as ‘non-citizens’ par excellence,
or ‘permanent aliens’, would undoubtedly fit into this category of people who fall under the
tyranny of citizens. Since Walzer deems such tyranny to be incompatible with liberal democra-
cies, the stateless should arguably be given a more prominent place within liberal political theory
on membership. Moreover, Walzer admits that the stateless fall within that category of ‘neces-
sitous’ men and women (Walzer 1983, 45) who are able to ‘make the most forceful claim for
admission’ into the polity (Walzer 2008, 163).
For Benhabib’s part, she conceives of membership as the ‘right to have rights’. Belonging is
central to human dignity in her account and her human rights approach allows for the incorpor-
ation of stateless peoples’ claims-making when theorizing. Her work also places responsibility
upon liberal democracies to consider seriously the question of a right to membership and not to
ignore the effects of their practices upon non-citizens. She states, for example, that liberal
democracies ‘must themselves accept naturalization, i.e., admittance to citizenship, as the
obverse side of the injunction against denaturalization. Just as you cannot render individuals sta-
teless at will, nor can you, as a sovereign state, deny them membership in perpetuity’ (Benhabib
2004, 135).
Barbieri (1998), akin to Benhabib, argues that ‘questions of membership occupy a normative
context that encompasses and goes beyond the state – namely, the context of human rights’
(136). His work provides grounds for understanding statelessness as a form of domination.
Domination involves ‘a type of injustice involving a violation against human nature (be it under-
stood in terms of dignity or agency or eudaimonia) committed through the agency of others’
which, in turn, ‘gives rise to compelling claims of human right’ (130). Barbieri is quick to
point out, however, that domination obtains ‘in a given situation [dependent] on what goods
are important to the persons involved’ and the type of relationship that exists between those
who have power and those who do not (131).
Just as Benhabib’s account provides for a focus on human agency through the possibility of
the stateless’ claims-making, Barbieri’s domination perspective not only permits consideration
of violations of human agency as pertains to stateless people, but makes the stateless the focus of
inquiry by requiring the theorist to explore what it is they want – citizenship of the state within
which they reside in most cases – and their relationship to those in power. It is, therefore, a
 Journal of Global Ethics 65

rather intimate political account that does not theorize about the stateless outside of their
relationship to people and structures of domination. Barbieri’s (1998) recommendation that
‘the appropriate structure for citizenship policies is one in which residents are at a certain
point presumed to be citizens unless they explicitly demand not to be included’ (116) is also
pertinent to consider in the construction of a theory dealing with statelessness since citizenship
is the very status that these people do not have.
Despite these important insights, the accounts of Walzer, Benhabib and Barbieri are wanting
on several fronts when it comes to theorizing on just membership and statelessness. Before
engaging in a critique of their work, however, it must be noted that none of these authors
sets out to theorize about statelessness and global justice. In Spheres of justice, Walzer (1983)
explicitly notes that ‘membership and nonmembership are not the only or, for our purposes,
the most important set of possibilities’ regarding belonging and political community (32). He
consequently engages predominantly with the subject of guest workers and why they should
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

be ‘offered the opportunities of citizenship’ (62).

Benhabib focuses primarily on the question of immigration and transnational border-
crossings, although she introduces the stateless several times in The rights of others, mostly with
regard to refugees and asylum seekers. In Ethics of citizenship, Barbieri examines the case of
guest workers in Germany and does not take up the question of statelessness, except to mention
stateless people in passing in an example once or twice. The main criticism of these scholars,
therefore, is that they do not sufficiently engage the subject of statelessness in their theorizing on
global justice and questions of membership. The following section expands on this criticism.

3. Silence and subsumption

It is not uncommon for statelessness to be ignored in the theoretical literature on global justice.
As noted by Benhabib (2004) and others, questions of membership have not figured predomi-
nantly in contemporary political theory (xiii). Even when authors, such as Walzer, Benhabib
and Barbieri, do consider questions of membership and global justice, they fail to engage
statelessness comprehensively. Silence on the subject, or subsuming statelessness within the
examination of some other topic – such as refugees or immigrants – is typical. Thus, when
Walzer brackets the question of statelessness, or when the stateless are eased out of Benhabib’s
analysis, or fail to show up other than in passing in Barbieri’s account, it is not unexpected.
While Walzer’s (1983) right of place and recognition of ‘claim[s] of necessity’ may provide
grounds for arguing that the stateless should at least have a right of place and could be regarded
as potentially ‘necessitous’ men and women (45), his account poses several problems for a
theory of just membership concerning the stateless. The right of place, as described by
Walzer, is not a right to a ‘particular place’ (43), but is something ‘owed’ by the state and is
‘particularly powerful when . . . people have come where they have come illegally, if they
have no other place to go’ (Walzer 2008, 157). What, however, if the people have not come
from somewhere else? What if they have always lived within the confines of the state, but are
the strangers ‘within,’ the needy ‘insiders’ as opposed to the needy ‘outsiders’? Is the right of
place as ‘powerful’ then?
Although Walzer (1983) does not expend much time on this group of people, his answer
seems to be in the affirmative: ‘every immigrant and every resident is a citizen too or at least
a potential citizen’ (52). This statement, however, is qualified by a prior assumption – that
these ‘potential’ citizens are ‘rightfully where they are’ (52). This assumption is problematic
when it comes to the stateless who often lack identifying documents and face discrimination
in many of the countries within which they reside. It is not entirely clear how they would
prove their ‘rightful’ presence, especially when one considers that the stateless are dependent
 66 K.A. Belton

upon government bureaucracies – often the very entities that grant, revoke and deny citizenship
on behalf of states – to provide them documentation.
Additionally, it is unclear whether the stateless would unequivocally fall into Walzer’s cat-
egory of ‘potential’ citizens. For instance, he states that ‘[e]very new immigrant, every refugee
taken in, every resident and worker must be offered the opportunities of citizenship’ (62). Yet the
stateless are neither immigrants nor necessarily refugees and their presence as ‘resident’ or
‘worker’ may not be considered ‘rightful’ or lawful by the state concerned, hence leaving a
crack through which they can (and do) fall.
Walzer also asserts that ‘[m]en and women are either subject to the full force of the state’s
authority or they are not, and if they are subject they must be given a say, and ultimately an equal
say, in what that authority does’ (61). Yet it is debateable whether the stateless – who are not
recognized as nationals by any state under the operation of its law – are subject to the state’s
authority in the same way that other categories of persons are subject to it. Thus, the ‘right of
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

place’ – what it means, whether it applies specifically to stateless people, and how they
might use it to achieve basic rights and protections – needs further theorizing.
Benhabib draws statelessness into her discussion of just membership when she analyses
Arendt and the latter’s coinage of the phrase ‘right to have rights’. Human rights were intimately
bound up with citizenship for Arendt (Benhabib 2004, 68). She observed, for instance, how
[t]he conception of human rights, based upon the assumed existence of a human being as such, broke
down at the very moment when those who professed to believe in it were for the first time confronted
with people who had indeed lost all other qualities and specific relationships – except that they were
still human. The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human. (1968, 299)

Benhabib (2004) argues throughout The rights of others, however, that human rights need to
be decoupled from citizenship so that basic rights are no longer contingent on the possession of a
nationality. Personhood is key in her account: ‘The right to have rights today means the recog-
nition of the universal status of personhood of each and every human being independently of
their national citizenship’ (68). While this appeal to ‘personhood’ is laudable in that it recognizes
the moral worth of all humans – and their ‘right to have rights’ regardless of nationality status –
this position is not novel and it may not be the most effective way to instantiate rights currently,
especially the rights of stateless people.
Over 60 years ago, the UDHR asserted that ‘[e]veryone is entitled to all the rights and free-
doms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind’ such as ‘national or social
origin . . . birth or other status’ (Article 2). Accordingly, all rights and freedoms should be
extended to everyone because of their humanity and personhood, not because they are citizens
of a given state. The fact remains, however, that such rights are not easy to come by if one is
stateless within a polity. As noted earlier, in those instances where basic rights are provided to
the stateless, these rights are contingent upon lawful presence – a qualification that one does
not find in the 1951 Refugee Convention.
This brings us to a problem with Benhabib’s (2004) account of statelessness: although she
recognizes a distinction between stateless people and refugees (55), she has a narrow under-
standing of what it means to be stateless and does not fully address the membership claims of
stateless people as she does refugees. For Benhabib, statelessness seems only to be a phenom-
enon of denationalization: ‘one is a stateless person if the state whose protection one has hitherto
enjoyed withdraws such protection, as well as nullifying the papers it has granted’ (55). This
definition, however, only scratches the surface of the multiple ways in which a person can
become stateless.
Stateless people are not all former citizens who have had state ‘protections’ withdrawn.
Many are born into statelessness due to inadequate nationality laws, or because their parents
 Journal of Global Ethics 67

were stateless and they ‘inherited’ the status because the state they were born in does not recog-
nize the right of every child to a nationality regardless of parental citizenship status. Others
become stateless when their state of citizenship implodes (the former Union of Soviet Socialist
Republics, Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, for example) and the successor states fail to provide
citizenship to them in the new polity. In many instances, therefore, the problem of statelessness
is not that a state has withdrawn protections, it is that a state never offered protections in the first
place. Thus, whereas Benhabib wishes to escape Arendt’s conclusion that human rights are
bound up with citizenship, she does not manage to escape Arendt’s conception of statelessness
as denationalization (Arendt 1968). Future theorizing on the question of just membership must
consequently contend with both state action (denationalization) and inaction (never offering
citizenship in the first place) when it comes to statelessness.
Finally, it is not clear that Benhabib’s reconceptualization of the ‘right to have rights’ as
‘membership’ is different from Arendt’s conception of it as citizenship. Benhabib (2004)
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

writes that ‘the right to membership ought to be considered a human right, in the moral sense
of the term, and it ought to become a legal right as well by being incorporated into states’
constitutions through citizenship and naturalization provisions’ (73). If Benhabib claims that
the right to membership ought to be incorporated in law through state ‘citizenship and natural-
ization provisions’, how is this distinct, in the end, from arguing for a right to citizenship?
Moreover, she argues that ‘loss of membership’ is the same as ‘denaturalization’ (136), and
denaturalization, as she describes it, is ‘the loss of one’s citizenship status’ (135). If loss of mem-
bership means losing one’s citizenship status, then is a right to citizenship what Benhabib is
indirectly arguing for all along?
Perhaps if she had included a more thorough analysis of statelessness and its implications for
questions of global justice and membership these questions might have been avoided. As it
stands, however, Benhabib’s treatment of statelessness, while more detailed than that of
Walzer, is wanting. The stateless, who initially made an appearance in Benhabib’s discussion
of Arendt, are slowly eased out of her analysis. Whereas earlier in the book they are placed
in the same ‘special categories’ as refugees, minorities and displaced people (54), by the end
of the book they no longer figure into the discussion of just membership. Refugees, asylum
seekers and immigrants predominate.
In Ethics of citizenship, Barbieri’s main concern is with the status of guest workers, not all of
whom are recent immigrants. Stateless people, or the subject of statelessness, shows up in very
limited instances: in an example of the result of imperial German citizenship law (1998, 22), as
an instance of the transnational implications of citizenship (126), and in a footnote on Arendt
(189). He neither brackets the question of statelessness nor eases it out of his analysis; it simply
fails to show up in his theorizing on global justice and membership. This is surprising since he
considers ‘political membership’ to be a human right (115) and uses a human rights framework
– premised on the right to non-domination – when considering questions of membership (136).
Statelessness is a prime example of the domination of one type of people – citizens – over
another – the stateless – and its study should be part of ‘an ethical analysis of modern citizen-
ship’ practices (Barbieri 1998, 3). Yet Barbieri’s concern, as is the case of Walzer and Benhabib,
centres upon those who have entered the state from somewhere else, or who are descendants of
recent immigrants (in the case of children of guest workers). Like Walzer and Benhabib, he does
not consider adequately the question of the membership status of those who are not citizens, but
who have not immigrated into the polity.
It may be argued that Barbieri examines a case of a liberal polity wherein situations of state-
lessness are not as likely to arise, thus it is unfair to criticize him for not considering the stateless
in his ‘ethical analysis of modern citizenship’. Liberal polities are not immune to harbouring, or
creating, stateless people within their confines, however (Canadian Council for Refugees 2009;
 68 K.A. Belton

UNHCR 2011; van Waas 2009). Additionally, Barbieri acknowledges that citizenship ‘should in
principle be attributed to those occupying the territory over which sovereignty is exercised. This
inference holds independent of the sort of government employed by states’ (149). Thus, although
he is primarily concerned with the right to citizenship of permanent residents, or guest workers,
within Germany, he does argue that citizenship is a human right regardless of the type of
government a state has. It is not a stretch, therefore, to demand of his theory of non-domination
that it considers the stateless in its account of modern citizenship.
Moreover, Barbieri’s argument for providing citizenship on jus soli grounds to those children
born of non-citizen guest workers could readily be applied to the situation of those children who
are born to stateless parents. The children of non-citizen guest workers inherit ‘a different citi-
zenship that affords them no advantages in the society that is home to them’ (156). Despite the
same socialization as children of citizens, they are ‘official strangers in the only land they know’
(156). This sounds remarkably like the situation of stateless children, although the latter do not
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

hold a nominal citizenship from some other country and are not necessarily socialized in the
same manner – due to lack of access and resources – as the children of those who have citizen-
ship. If the children of non-citizen guest workers should arguably have a right to citizenship ‘in
the only land they know’, then the same argument should apply to the stateless who are without
any formal recognition of belonging at all.

4. Conclusion
The stateless are a special category of non-citizen as they hold no citizenship from anywhere.
Their legal and political invisibility is often translated into the theoretical domain where they
rarely show up in analyses of global justice and membership. If, as many authors like Walzer,
Barbieri and others posit, membership is the primary distributive good, and if millions of
people globally are denied the opportunity to acquire this basic good, then we must ask
whether the institution of sovereign states as currently construed is just. Nagel, as noted earlier,
observes that ‘[w]e are required to accord equal status to anyone with whom we are joined in a
strong and coercively imposed political community’ (2005, 133). Although some scholars use
this conception to justify privileging co-members’ concerns because they share the same coercive
legal system (Blake 2001/2008), this narrow understanding ignores that we are all members of the
coercive institution of sovereign states. As Barbieri (1998) points out, ‘national citizenship arises
only within an international setting, as a category used collectively by states to divide persons
among themselves and to determine the sphere of their authority’ (126).
Since citizenship is supposed to be acquired by everyone equally, and since international law
posits that one must be a citizen of somewhere, it is unjust that millions do not have this status, or
the opportunity to acquire it. As pointed out previously, the institution of sovereign states, and
our membership within it, is not a ‘voluntary association or contract among independent parties’
(Nagel 2005, 140). Therefore, questions of justice do apply. Thus, when Benhabib argues for the
consideration of just membership practices outside of the framework of distributive justice, she
ignores the fact that statelessness is a question of distributive justice. It is not a matter of redis-
tributing the membership of states so that a person from X illiberal and impoverished country
can live in Y liberal and wealthy country. It is a matter of distributing citizenship at all. The sta-
teless are not citizens; they have not received the membership good to which they have a human
right (Article 15, UDHR). They should be treated as the citizens’ moral equal and attain this
formal status. While this formal citizenship status is no guarantee of substantive equality, it is
a necessary step for recognition of legal personhood and the rights associated thereof.
Thus, while Benhabib (2004) argues that ‘[t]he right to have rights today means the recog-
nition of the universal status of personhood of each and every human being independently of
 Journal of Global Ethics 69

their national citizenship’ (68), the situation of the stateless demonstrates that it is still difficult to
achieve recognition as a person with rights without at least formal membership status, in this
case that of citizenship. As Barbieri (1998) notes, ‘despite the ongoing evolution of political
structures, the institution of citizenship in independent and sovereign states is likely to maintain
its central importance to us for some time’ (6). Because we continue to struggle to find some-
thing ‘sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human’ (Arendt 1968, 299), citizenship is
still necessary as a foundation upon which to make rights claims and seek protections. Again,
it may not be sufficient, but we cannot deny to those who do not have any citizenship that
this status is unnecessary.
Of the three authors discussed in this text, Barbieri comes closest to recognizing the import
of citizenship for the stateless, even if he does not explicitly deal with them in his work. Whereas
Walzer declares that states are simply free to take people into their membership or not (1983,
61), and Benhabib (2004) holds that democracies have the ‘right . . . to regulate the transition
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

from first admission to full membership’ (221), Barbieri (1998) argues that those residing
within the polity should be presumed citizens unless they desire otherwise: ‘Already established
residents . . . not only have a right to political membership, but should be granted full . . .
membership status unless they make a point of refusing it’ (143).
Barbieri (1998) does not limit this presumption to those who are ‘lawfully’ or ‘rightfully’
residing within the state either: ‘One’s claim to belonging increases with residence, irrespective
of the circumstances of admission’ (157). This position is a strong case for the right of those
stateless people, who have never left the territory of the state within which they were born
and reside, to acquire citizenship. Additionally, it explicitly gives them agency by recognizing
that they must choose whether to reject the proffered citizenship status or not.
In addition to Walzer, Benhabib and Barbieri’s prohibition on permanent alienage, this
presumption of belonging provides a firm basis from which to explore further the question of
statelessness and global justice. If future scholars seriously contend with these two positions
– the assumption of citizenship and the prohibition on permanent alienage – when theorizing
about just membership, it is unlikely that the stateless will remain invisible within liberal politi-
cal theory on the subject. Their visibility will also increase if theorists of just membership turn
their sights inward and away from the borders. As this paper has argued, an examination of
statelessness is not adequately captured within discussions of transnational migration or refugee-
hood. Future theorizing on global justice and membership, therefore, must acknowledge that just
membership questions necessitate not simply looking at who is let in and what naturalization
procedures should be extended to them, but also entails examining who has always been on
the inside, and to whom we need to justify their continued exclusion from citizenship and
questions of just membership.

Acknowledgements
The author would like to thank Dr Serena Parekh, Department of Philosophy, University of
Connecticut, for her guidance and constructive feedback on this article.

Notes
1. In the international sphere, ‘nationality’ refers to ‘citizenship’. Thus, in this article, nationality and citi-
zenship are used interchangeably – a practice common in the literature on statelessness (see, for
example, Batchelor 2006; Forced Migration Review 2009; Perks and de Chickera 2009; Sokoloff
2005; United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees & the Inter Parliamentary Union 2005).
 70 K.A. Belton

2. Moreover, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR), which is mandated with
the protection of the stateless, holds that the de facto stateless should be treated as if they were
de jure stateless (Massey 2010).

References
Agier, M. 2008. On the margins of the world: The refugee experience today. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Arendt, H. 1968. The origins of totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Inc.
Barbieri, W.A., Jr. 1998. Ethics of citizenship: Immigration and group rights in Germany. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press.
Batchelor, C. 1998. Statelessness and the problem of resolving nationality status. International Journal of
Refugee Law 10, no. 1: 56–83.
Batchelor, C. 2006. Transforming international legal principles into national law: The right to a nationality
and the avoidance of statelessness. Refugee Survey Quarterly 25, no. 3: 8– 25.
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

Belton, K.A. 2010. Arendt’s children in the Bahamian context: The children of migrants without status.
International Journal of Bahamian Studies 16: 35 –50. http://journals.sfu.ca/cob/index.php/files/
article/view/127 (accessed November 20, 2010).
Benhabib, S. 2004. The rights of others: Aliens, residents and citizens. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Black, R. 2001. Fifty years of refugee studies: From theory to policy. International Migration Review 35,
no. 1: 57 –78.
Blake, M. 2001/2008. Distributive justice, state coercion, and autonomy. In Global justice: Seminal essays,
ed. T. Pogge and D. Moellendorf, 657 –95. St Paul, MN: Paragon House.
Blitz, B.K. 2006. Statelessness and the social (de)construction of citizenship: political restructuring and
ethnic discrimination in Slovenia. Journal of Human Rights 5, no. 4: 453– 79.
Bosniak, L. 2006. The citizens and the alien: Dilemmas of contemporary membership. Princeton, NJ:
Princeton University Press.
Canadian Council for Refugees. 2009. Statelessness and Canada: An introduction, http://www.ccrweb.ca/
documents/statelessnessprimerEN.pdf (accessed May 27, 2010).
Carens, J.H. 1987/2008. Aliens and citizens: The case for open borders. In Global justice: Seminal essays,
ed. T. Pogge and D. Moellendorf, 211 –33. St Paul, MN: Paragon House.
Cole, P. 2000. Philosophies of exclusion: Liberal political theory and immigration. Edinburgh, UK:
Edinburgh University Press.
Convention on Certain Questions relating to the Conflict of Nationality Law. 1930. http://www.unhcr.org/
refworld/publisher,LON,,,3ae6b3b00,0.html (accessed May 27, 2010).
Forced Migration Review. 2009. Statelessness. Refugees Study Centre no. 32: 1–76. http://www.fmreview.
org/FMRpdfs/FMR32/FMR32.pdf (accessed February 26, 2011).
Gibney, M.J. 2004. The ethics and politics of asylum: Liberal democracy and the response to refugees.
New York: Cambridge University Press.
Haddad, E. 2008. The refugee in international society: Between sovereigns. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Leclerc, P. 2007. Q&A: The world’s 15 million stateless people need help, http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/
texis/vtx/news/opendoc.htm?tbl=NEWS&id=464dca3c4 (accessed April 8, 2010).
Lynch, M. 2005. Lives on hold: The human cost of statelessness. Refugees International1 –52, http://www.
reliefweb.int/rw/lib.nsf/db900SID/LHON-69MDDZ?OpenDocument (accessed May 27, 2010).
Lynch, M., and T. Cook. 2006. Citizens of nowhere: The stateless Biharis of Bangladesh. Refugees
International, http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/pdfid/47a6eba70.pdf (accessed April 8, 2010).
Manly, M. 2007. The spirit of Geneva – traditional and new actors in the field of statelessness. Refugee
Survey Quarterly 26, no. 4: 255 –61.
Massey, H. 2010. UNHCR and de facto statelessness. Department of International Protection. United
Nations High Commissioner for Refugees. LPPR/2010/01, http://www.unhcr.org/4bc2ddeb9.html
(accessed February 26, 2011).
Nagel, T. 2005. The problem of global justice. Philosophy & Public Affairs 33, no. 2: 113–47.
Ong, A. 1999. Flexible citizenship: The cultural logics of transnationality. Durhman, NC: Duke University
Press.
Ong, A. 2006. Mutations in citizenship. Theory, Culture & Society 23, no. 2/3: 499– 505.
Perks, K., and A. de Chickera. 2009. The silent stateless and the unhearing world. Can equality compel us to
listen? The Equal Rights Review 3: 42 –55.
 Journal of Global Ethics 71

Permanent Court of International Justice. 1923. Advisory Opinion on the Tunis and Morocco Nationality.
Decrees. Ser. B, No. 4.
Pogge, T. 2008. An egalitarian law of peoples. In Global justice: Seminal essays, ed. T. Pogge and
D. Moellendorf, 462 –93. St Paul, MN: Paragon House.
Sassen, S. 2003. The repositioning of citizenship: Emergent subjects and spaces for politics. CR: The New
Centennial Review 3, no. 2: 41–66.
Shachar, A. 2007. Against birthright privilege: redefining citizenship as property. In Identities, affiliations,
and allegiances, ed. Seyla Benhabib, Ian Shapiro, and Danilo Petranovic, 257–81. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press.
Shachar, A. 2009. The worth of citizenship in an unequal world. Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8, no. 2:
367– 88.
Sokoloff, C. 2005. Denial of citizenship: A challenge to human security. Advisory Board on Human
Security, 1–36, http://ochaonline.un.org/ochalinkclick.aspx?link=ocha&docid=1003253 (accessed
May 27, 2010).
Soysal, Y.N. 1998. Toward a postnational model of membership. In The citizenship debates, ed. G. Shafir,
189– 217. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Downloaded by [Ryerson University Library] at 14:33 04 June 2016

Trop v. Dulles. 1958. 356 U.S. 86.

UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 1951. Convention relating to the status of
refugees, http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49da0e466.html (accessed April 8, 2010).
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 1954. Convention relating to the status
of stateless persons, http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?docid=3ae6b3840
(accessed May 27, 2010).
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 1961. Convention on the reduction of
statelessness, http://www.unhcr.org/cgi-bin/texis/vtx/refworld/rwmain?docid=3ae6b39620 (accessed
May 27, 2010).
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2004. Final report concerning the
questionnaire on statelessness pursuant to the agenda for protection, http://www.unhcr.org/protect/
PROTECTION/4047002e4.pdf (accessed March 12, 2009).
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2009a. Progress report on statelessness 2009.
EC/60/SC/CRP.10.
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2009b. States parties to the 1954 convention
relating to the status of stateless persons, http://www.unhcr.org/3bbb0abc7.html (accessed May 27,
2010).
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2009c. States parties to the 1961 convention
on the reduction of statelessness, http://www.unhcr.org/3bbb24d54.html (accessed May 27, 2010).
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees). 2011. Who is stateless and where? http://
www.unhcr.org/pages/49c3646c15e.html (accessed February 26, 2011).
UNHCR (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees), and the Interparliamentary Union. 2005.
Nationality and statelessness: A handbook for parliamentarians, http://www.unhcr.org/protect/
PROTECTION/436774c62.pdf (accessed November 2, 2009).
United Nations. 1948. Universal Declaration of Human Rights, http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/
(accessed May 27, 2010).
van Waas, L. 2008. Nationality matters: Statelessness under international law. Antwerp: Intersentia.
van Waas, L. 2009. Statelessness: A 21st century challenge for Europe. Security and Human Rights 20,
no. 2: 133 –46.
Walzer, M. 1983. Spheres of justice: A defense of pluralism and equality. New York: Basic Books.
Walzer, M. 2008. The distribution of membership. In Global justice: Seminal essays, ed. T. Pogge and
D. Moellendorf, 145–77. St Paul, MN: Paragon House.