Guest blog by Kolleen Guy and Jay Winter
In her landmark 1951 book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt wrote that the stateless “are no longer human in any sense other than that they belong to the human race. Their very humanity had become questionable” (Arendt 1951, The Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 299). The observation was not rhetorical: Arendt herself had been rendered stateless by the Nazis, expelled not only from Germany but, as she later reflected, from humanity altogether.
Refugee Week is a time for reflection, action, and recognition. It is also a moment to confront the uncomfortable reality that the world is home to more than 10 million stateless people today—from the Rohingya in Myanmar to generations of Palestinians, Kurds, and the children born in camps who inherit neither nationality nor protection. For these populations, the “right to have rights” remains unrealized.
In our book Statelessness after Arendt: European Refugees in China and the Pacific during the Second World War (Manchester University Press, 2025), we join with colleagues to revisit the question of what it means to be stateless through history, theory, and lived experience. The project is grounded in Hannah Arendt’s foundational work, but it also seeks to move beyond her Eurocentric frame, turning attention to the overlooked theaters of Asia, the Pacific, and the Antipodes during and after World War II. Here we explore not just what statelessness takes away – but what those living in that condition managed to build.
For Arendt, statelessness was a form of radical exclusion: without legal personality, the stateless could not act in the world. But is this the whole story? The stateless, we argue, were not inert. They did not simply disappear into camps, legal categories, or bureaucratic oblivion. On the contrary, in spaces like Shanghai, Tatura, and Singapore, they struggled, often with the help of “agents of empathy,” to recover a semblance of political life.
Counting the Cost
In most twentieth-century accounts of war, the focus has fallen on soldiers, on the mobilized, uniformed, counted dead. But the deeper reality of modern warfare tells another story. In recent conflicts, between 50 and 90 percent of all those killed have been civilians. This dramatic shift in the social distribution of wartime death has made civilians—not soldiers—the primary casualties of conflict. And among them, the stateless are the most vulnerable.
The uncounted toll of war includes millions of refugees whose names do not appear on monuments and whose stories are not often told in national histories. They include the 20,000 Jews who found tenuous safety in Shanghai before and during the Second World War. They include the children interned in Australian camps, categorized as “enemy aliens” despite having been stripped of their nationality by the Nazis. They include those who starved in ghettos and slums, forced to survive under occupation while holding no formal status in the societies that surrounded them. To remember them is not to moralize. It is to witness.
Empathy as Action
In Shanghai, amidst war and deprivation, a stateless community forged a life. Refugees ran hospitals, schools, and kitchens. They staged theatre productions, wrote poetry, and published newspapers. And it was there, too, that the Mir Yeshiva, the only intact Lithuanian yeshiva to survive the Holocaust, found refuge and continued its religious scholarship.
This mixed community of Jewish refugees owed their survival to the intervention of Laura Margolis, a field agent of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee. Margolis did more than distribute aid; she worked to rebuild a sense of community among the displaced. With a mix of “chutzpa and compassion,” she negotiated with occupying Japanese forces, hijacked industrial boilers to keep soup kitchens running, and became, in the eyes of many refugees, their lifeline.
Her example points to a powerful truth: empathy is not the opposite of politics, as Arendt once warned, but often its catalyst. Margolis resisted the indifference of bureaucracy and challenged the idea that aid should be neutral, dispassionate, or impersonal. She believed that the stateless had a right to dignity, and she acted on that belief.
Narratives of Survival
One of the great insights of our research is that storytelling is a political act. Arendt recognized this late in her career. In The Human Condition, she wrote: “With word and deed we insert ourselves into the human world” (Arendt 1958, The Human Condition, p. 176).
Stateless people have long understood this. To move from exclusion toward recognition, they had to tell their stories in ways that made sense to institutions. But even more than that, they had to find ways of narrating their own worth, of making meaning in a world that denied it.
What emerges from the chapters in our volume is not a single master narrative of suffering, but a constellation of stories: families rebuilding trust in camps; children learning in overcrowded classrooms; rabbis reciting prayers in languages forbidden in their homelands. These are not stories of redemption. They are stories of survival.
Statelessness in Our Time
Statelessness is not confined to the past. Today, the United Nations estimates that more than 10 million people live without citizenship. Some have been rendered stateless by conflict or persecution; others are born into it, inheriting legal limbo as a birthright.
They live in refugee camps, informal settlements, detention centers, and cities. They move through the world unrecognized by the very structures that claim to govern it.
Their plight demands more than humanitarian sympathy. It demands political imagination. We need to see statelessness not as an administrative anomaly, but as a central feature of the modern world, a symptom of borders drawn without consent, of states built on exclusion, of rights that remain tethered to nationality.
What would it mean to center the stateless in our thinking about human rights, democracy, and belonging? What would it mean to treat the uncounted as political subjects? These are not rhetorical questions. They are urgent demands.
This Refugee Week, we invite readers not only to mourn those lost to war and displacement, but to listen to those who survived it. To recognize the stories of the stateless as stories of endurance, resistance, and creativity.
The original source comes from: https://refugeeweek.org.uk/the-uncounted-statelessness-and-the-burden-of-our-times/
