I am addicted to this blog now. I discovered it recently, and can’t stop checking for new content.

Yeah i’m getting addicted to this blog too. I have a game going on to see when I read a story on the RSS feeds and then i wait to see whens its picked up by SM.

Their predicament deserves more attention, say experts, since national identity is the most fundamental of human rights – indeed, the very right to have rights.

i’m taking International Law at Emory right now… and we just learned about the effects of not having a nationality. the sick thing is that every case that was cited was from the early 1900s. And our most recent example was this guy who was living in the Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris.

i think it’s just horrendous that this is still going on!

No complaints so far. I haven’t put it in the laundry yet though.

• wearer of a brand new SM T-shirt

Statelessness is the untold dark side of new nations

Especially of new nations predicated on various mono-identities, as Umair points out. It’s a little odd that stranded Pakistanis exist in Bangladesh given that South Asian nations don’t have especially efficient state procedures to enforce and check citizenship (I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that millions of Bangladeshis have no proof of identity), but of course when states are carved out on ethnicity and/or religion, these can be remarkably efficient enforcers of citizenship…

“…The reasons for this impotence lie not only in the selfishness and blindness of bureaucratic machines, but in the basic notions themselves that regulate the inscription of the native (that is, of life) in the legal order of the nation-state. Hannah Arendt titled chapter 5 of her book Imperialism, dedicated to the problem of refugees, “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man.” This formulation – which inextricably links the fates of the rights of man and the modern national state, such that the end of the latter necessarily implies the obsolescence of the former – should be taken seriously. The paradox here is that precisely the figure that should have incarnated the rights of man par excellence, the refugee, constitutes instead the radical crisis of this concept. “The concept of the Rights of man,” Arendt writes, “based on the supposed existence of a human being as such, collapsed in ruins as soon as those who professed it found themselves for the first time before men who had truly lost every other specific quality and connection except for the mere fact of being humans.” In the nation-state system, the so-called sacred and inalienable rights of man prove to be completely unprotected at the very moment it is no longer possible to characterize them as rights of the citizens of a state. … That there is no autonomous space within the political order of the nation-state for something like the pure man in himself is evident at least in the fact that, even in the best of cases, the status of the refugee is always considered a temporary condition that should lead either to naturalization or to repatriation. A permanent status of man in himself is inconceivable for the law of the nation-state.”

And the fact that the above is as a practical matter true is precisely the problem with political liberalism, from the French Revolution to Anglo-American liberalism in the 19th century and onwards to our times. Over half a century ago Hannah Arendt wrote movingly of the plight of not only the stateless, but of how “modern” nation states, and the creation of such nation states (premised, typically, on “one” people, “one” nation, “one” everything) almost demands the manufacture of statelessness, by way of defining a whole class of people as not belonging to the new state. The world saw this with the wholesale expulsion of Jews from Egypt, Iraq, and other Arab countries when Israel was declared; with the flight of the Palestinians in 1948; with the mind-boggling population transfers of 1947-48 between India and Pakistan; with the “Biharis” of Bangladesh, and not to mention many cases spawned by various conflicts in Africa. In fact we see it internally in countries too: in India, the number of displaced in Tripura has been said to be in the vicinity of 75,000; 100,000 Muslims fled their homes (or were driven away) in the Gujarat pogroms; 500-800,000 Kashmiri pundits fled (or were driven away) when the independence movement in Kashmir began in earnest in 1989-90.

I am not sure if according “more rights” is an adequate solution when such a rights-based discourse and way of thinking (specifically the way in which, for all the talk of human rights, as a practical matter rights remain hostage to nationality) is itself part of the problem.

Some links/work that I’ve found useful: One, Two.