2025 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 7(2) The categorisation of individuals into discrete identities — stateless, refugee or citizen — led to the neglect of accounts outside these categories. In fact, even where studies aim to make a connection between social and political conditions that warrant the language of de facto statelessness, the term is avoided. For instance, a 2025 article on the Windrush Scandal by Eve Hayes de Kalaf spotlights the precarity of the Windrush generation, the threats to their right to remain and the discrimination they experienced. 47 Hayes de Kalaf uses the language of ‘statelessness-like’ to describe the subjects of her study, 48 despite their strong similarities to the affective harms of Arendt’s first stage of de facto statelessness I outline below. Contrasting Hayes de Kalaf, this piece directly confronts the disjuncture between legal nationality and effective citizenship, insisting upon the usage of the phrase de facto stateless as central to my aims. Conceptualising the struggles of the Haitian populace through this lens demonstrates that formal nationality can exist in name only when protection, rights and belonging are fractured, as is starkly illustrated through the cases of the 2010 earthquake and the loss of democratic voting since 2016. By leveraging Arendt’s de facto statelessness, I resist the epistemic injustice that arises within statelessness studies when we neglect those who do not fit within existing binaries. The value of this intervention is that Haiti represents not a metaphorical or ‘statelessness-like’ experience, but a structurally reproduced condition of exclusion equivalent in many respects to statelessness proper. I aim to replicate Arendt’s demand that citizenship is not a simple possessive, but something that must be continually and emphatically partaken in, the possibility of which is only existent where there is that citizen-community-state connection that I will argue Haiti is deprived of at present. The de facto stateless were emphasised in the writings of a foundational theorist in this field, Arendt. Specifically, her seminal work The Origins of Totalitarianism worked to reflect the harms of a lack of functioning citizenship and meaningful political belonging. 49 It is those who are ‘defined by their exclusion’ who are foregrounded by Arendt. 50 The conditions felt by these groups in the Haitian context are at the focus of my analysis and typically are left uncaptured by legalistic viewpoints. In Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt outlines the stages of statelessness in three parts. First, displaced peoples lose their homes, and their ‘entire social texture’.51 The second stage is a loss of government protection and legal status leading to rightlessness.52 The third and final stage is the displaced peoples’ loss of identity.53 While my focus deviates in that it does not necessarily include a loss of home or migratory context that Arendt writes from, this wording alludes to a view of statelessness as a series of conditions or an evolution rather than a static, statist label. Other theorists have adopted a similar approach to envisioning citizenship. Rhoda Howard-Hassman explores the ‘slippery concept 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 Eve Hayes de Kalaf, ‘Reframing the Windrush Scandal as an International Statelessness Crisis’ (2025) 6(2) Statelessness and Citizenship Review 179. ibid 184. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 3) 349; Parekh (n 45) 84. Serena Parekh, ‘Beyond the Ethics of Admission: Stateless People, Refugee Camps and Moral Obligations’ (2013) 40(7) Philosophy and Social Criticism 645, 654. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 3) 384. ibid 384–5. ibid 385–6. 134