Rethinking Statelessness from Within striking aspect exclusively by American prosperity’.14 However, though Arendt notes the role of slavery in enabling the American colonists to reap the benefit of a poverty-less existence, she is neglectful of the settler-colonial aspect both in the US context, and in such a way that reflects on my Haitian case study. Lucy Benjamin argues that Arendt neglects the structural nature of violence in the specifically settler-colonial context: ‘as colonialism transitions into settlercolonialism and the invasion becomes a structural event “come to stay”, Arendt largely forewent interrogation of the absorption of colonial violence into the settler-state’.15 That is, Arendt neglects the continuous and structural nature of coloniality that post-colonial theorists have established in today’s theoretical landscape, and by extension, the fulfilment of citizenship for colonised groups.16 Jennifer Gaffney reflects a similar view, stating that the ‘Haitian Revolution serves not merely to remind us of the shortcomings of Arendt’s discourse on the European legacy of slavery and colonisation’.17 Gaffney and Benjamin’s flagging of this omission by Arendt is a worthy consideration. My use of Arendt then is not wholehearted, but rather, a tactical application of her notion of de facto statelessness to analyse the breakdown in citizenship fulfilment within Haiti. The value of Arendt’s work, to be explored throughout the piece, is to help provide greater theoretical application of the concept of statelessness, and a renewed exploration of Haiti’s political conditions as we near ten years since their last democratic election. For Arendt, the failure of the French and American revolutions’ endurance was their inability to preserve the ‘revolutionary spirit’ and was ‘preceded by the failure of the revolution to provide it with a lasting institution’ wherein debate, opinion, direct representation and the interests of ‘public freedom, public happiness, public spirit’ should have been central to a new body politic.18 Arendt mourned many a nation’s failure to properly set up a foundation to enable the continuation of the revolutionary new beginnings. However, Haiti’s revolutionary founder (to borrow Arendt’s language) Toussaint Louverture, was most comprehensive in his creation of a foundation for the new state. The constitution included provisions for ‘property regimes, work, social relations, political institutions, the new form of power, ideology, relations with the Colonial power, the difficulties of autonomy and the threat of neocolonialism’. 19 While Arendt labels a loss of the revolutionary spirit as the cause for revolutionary failure, in the Haitian context, this appears neglectful of the reality for many nations of the Global South whose revolutions failed to persevere, not due to a neglect for the political, but as a result of Western interventionism that ravaged the democratic, republic-forming and public freedom-orientated institutions Arendt heralded. As Suzy Castor expresses, after the ‘centenary of [Haiti’s] independence (1904), the last vestiges of a more or less stable government in Haiti disappeared’,20 and with it, the US intervention and twenty-year occupation of Haiti set into motion a 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 ibid 71. Lucy Benjamin, Planetary Politics: Arendt, Anarchy and the Climate Crisis (Edinburgh University Press 2025) 79. Arendt, On Revolution (n 10) 22. Jennifer Gaffney, ‘Memories of Exclusion: Hannah Arendt and the Haitian Revolution’ (2017) 44(6) Philosophy and Social Criticism 701, 702. Arendt, On Revolution (n 10) 221, 232. Castañeda Fuertes (n 12) 294. Suzy Castor, ‘The American Occupation of Haiti (1915-34) and the Dominican Republic (1916-24)’ (1974) 15(1–2) The Massachusetts Review 253, 254. 129