RETHINKING STATELESSNESS FROM WITHIN: DE
FACTO STATELESSNESS AND (DYS)FUNCTIONAL
CITIZENSHIP IN HAITI
REBEKAH PRYSTUPA*
The concept of statelessness is typically framed as a legalistic issue caused by displacement or
migration. This state-focussed lens serves to marginalise the experiences of the de facto stateless
and those whose experiences fall outside the legalistic binary of citizen or de jure stateless. This
article works to disrupt these tendencies by conceptualising the intra-national issues of
‘unbelonging’ and lack of political agency in Haiti as a phenomenon of de facto statelessness. In
doing so, this article reframes the colonial ramifications of Western interventionism in Haiti and
their exacerbation of the effects of the 2010 earthquake and loss of voting since 2016 as a crisis of
de facto statelessness. Through engagement with the political theory of Hannah Arendt, leveraged
alongside the writings of post-colonial Haitian authors, this article recentres the experiences of
individuals in Haiti as deeply affected by political disenfranchisement and unbelonging.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I
II
III
IV
Introduction ........................................................................................................... 126
Background ........................................................................................................... 128
Case Study ............................................................................................................. 130
The Value of a De Facto Statelessness Lens ......................................................... 133
A Rooted Displacement ................................................................................ 136
B Functioning Citizenship ............................................................................ 137
V The Earthquake...................................................................................................... 139
VI Voting and Governance ......................................................................................... 144
A Extractivism and Deforestation as Failed Governance ............................. 147
VII Conclusion ............................................................................................................. 149
I
INTRODUCTION
Discussions of statelessness have been traditionally dominated by legalistic
perspectives, primarily emphasising the role of states in adhering to strict legal
rules and categorising the stateless based on ‘recognisable [legal] fact’. 1 The
prevailing definition of statelessness, enshrined in the 1954 Convention Relating
to the Status of Stateless Persons defines a stateless individual as someone ‘not
considered as a national by any State under the operation of its law’.2 While this
*
Rebekah Prystupa is a recent graduate of the Bachelor of Arts (Honours) at the University of
Melbourne, having written her thesis on an ontological conceptualisation of statelessness
rooted in the theory of Hannah Arendt. She writes primarily from a political theory lens.
© 2025 The Author. This is an open-access article licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International Licence, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and
reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and indicate if
changes were made. See <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/>.
1
2
Patrick Hayden and Natasha Saunders, ‘Solidarity at the Margins: Arendt, Refugees, and the
Inclusive Politics of World-Making’ in Kei Hiruta (ed), Arendt on Freedom, Liberation, and
Revolution (Palgrave Macmillan 2019) 172.
Convention relating to the Status of Stateless Persons, opened for signature 28 September
1954, 360 UNTS 117 (entered into force 6 June 1960) art 1.