2025 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 7(2) a uniquely individualised and political identity.73 In this piece, I rely on Kingston’s notion of ‘functioning citizenship’ to help identify and label this within the Haitian context. In her book Fully Human, Kingston introduces functioning citizenship, which requires ‘active and mutually beneficial relationship[s]’ between states and individuals and is inclusive of people enjoying membership of a political community.74 This view of citizenship entails both functioning engagement with the government and demands rights to place and purpose to be enjoyed amongst members of a community.75 This represents a contrast from the legalistic focus on de jure statelessness which underscores the relationship between the individual and the state and which is manifested by a formal, legal status-like citizenship.76 For instance, Kingston describes Indigenous peoples in the US lacking ‘active and mutually beneficial relationship[s] with the state’ as de facto stateless,77 as I argue is the case for most Haitians today. While these experiences may be neglected by traditional studies on statelessness, a move towards foregrounding the de facto stateless and its manifestations can mitigate this epistemic injustice. Much like how Kingston’s construct of the Indigenous American as lacking functioning citizenship conceptualising Haitians in this manner also represents a turn in both our understanding of statelessness and the specific experiences of disadvantaged peoples. A move towards the fulfilment of functioning citizenship and understanding the denial of its conditions can work to expand our conceptualisation of statelessness. I do so by following an ethos of integrating both top-down or ‘from above’ (state-based) and bottom-up or ‘from below’ (community-centred) perspectives on belonging and precarity, as advocated for by theorists such as Alessandra Benedicty. 78 In doing so, I re-centre political theorising from top-down discussions by governments to a community-oriented perspective of the needs of the people who are directly impacted by the effects of what I consider to be de facto statelessness in Haiti. In Haiti, there is a liminality of status experienced by the populace. While they may possess technical, legal Haitian nationality, it becomes distressingly clear through examination of their circumstances that they do not possess the benefits of functioning citizenship. Patrick Sylvain, reviewing Fatton’s 2014 book, states that Haiti’s existing order is one where ‘corruption, vengeance, and banditry [have] become normative’, such that ‘political membership in a fair and transparent society is not possible. The inherited condition of unfairness that one experiences is a given within a structural process of bringing rights-bearing subjects into nothingness’. 79 This confronting description illustrates what those in Haiti are stuck in-between: as though they are citizens of Haiti, as Sylvain notes, their rights-bearing status and political membership’s existence are ineffective or non-functioning. 80 Where de jure statelessness or refugeehood are ill-fitting 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (University of Chicago Press, 2nd ed, 1998) (‘Arendt, The Human Condition’). Kingston (n 27) 6, citing Lindsey N Kingston, ‘Statelessness as a Lack of Functioning Citizenship’ (2014) 19(1–2) Tilburg Law Review 127, 127. ibid. ibid 19, 29. ibid 19. Alessandra Benedicty, ‘Questions We Are Asking: Hegel, Agamben, Dayan, Trouillot, Mbembe, and Haitian Studies’ (2013) 19(1) Journal of Haitian Studies 6, 11. Sylvain (n 29) 230. ibid 231. 138