2025 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 7(2) specific national context and offering insights into the lived experiences of those who are effectively without citizenship. In thinking about statelessness and the Haitian context in such a manner, I reframe the focus from a lack of state capacity to provide functioning citizenship, to a lack of a functioning relationship between the state and its citizens, placing emphasis on the tangible events impacting Haitians. My framing encourages a more holistic approach to statelessness, expanding the field to develop theoretical frameworks that can better capture the lived realities of stateless people, moving beyond legal definitions to encompass issues of social texture, political agency and the state-citizen relationship. II BACKGROUND Haiti’s political history must be understood in the context of slavery and settler-colonisation. The longevity of coloniality cannot be understated in the Haitian context. From the 16th to the 19th century, the Caribbean received the majority of the 12.5 million Africans forcibly migrated to the Americas. 8 The obvious connection between statelessness and slavery during this period and up to the point of emancipation for the enslaved was that by virtue of their enslavement, Haitians of African descent could never achieve citizenship. France even extended voting rights to the non-property-owning white citizens in Haiti, prioritising race over property ownership for voting eligibility and thus citizenship, even before these same reforms came to France or the West.9 Post-slavery, the pernicious and enduring nature of the colonial project was encapsulated by the unstable and threatened status of the Haitian republic as independent from the West. Haiti (then named Saint-Domingue) embodied Arendt’s notion of ‘revolution’ — wherein by liberating themselves, a new body politic was formed with the notions of freedom and a new beginning at its core. 10 Freeing itself from Napoleon Bonaparte’s restoration of slavery in 1805, the newly formed Haitian state embodied many of the factors Arendt considered essential to a successful post-revolutionary republic: a progressive conceptualisation of citizenship not bound to property rights, a constitution and an insistence upon freedom and dignity.11 The Haitian Revolution, chronically undervalued by academia on revolution and citizenship, is emblematic of true liberation propelled the condition of freedom and the social importance of an event ‘led by slaves’ in a manner never seen before.12 Like many others, Arendt neglected contemporary slave liberation movements as an example of ‘revolution’ — an unfortunate deficit of her writing, instead focussing on the American and French contexts in her work On Revolution. Arendt recognises the role of slavery in allowing the White classes of the United States of America (‘US’) to achieve ‘prosperous conditions’, 13 thus freeing themselves from the cyclicality of poverty and enabling their revolutionary pursuits to be dedicated only to the political realm. She states, ‘[i]f it were not for the presence of Negro slavery on the American scene, one would be tempted to explain this 8 9 10 11 12 13 ibid 21. ibid 20. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (Penguin Group 1965) 29 (‘Arendt, On Revolution’). ibid 126; Santos (n 5) 20. Digna Castañeda Fuertes, ‘The Haitian Revolution: Legacy and Actuality’ (2010) 2(3–4) International Journal of Cuban Studies 286. Arendt, On Revolution (n 10) 23. 128