Rethinking Statelessness from Within of citizenship’ by presenting a spectrum.54 At the top are those who ‘enjoy both de jure and de facto citizenship in wealthy, democratic countries’ while those at the bottom endure the loss of de jure and de facto citizenship.55 Many who find themselves typically excluded from legal definitions of statelessness, such as ‘refugees, asylum seekers, economic immigrants, even naturalized citizens who faced the threat of denaturalization in times of emergency’ can be included in considerations of de facto statelessness.56 Arendt rebukes the limited legal definition and argues for a more expansive notion of citizenship which encapsulates feelings of belonging, rootedness and community. This encapsulates the loss of one’s home, their ‘social texture’, their ‘distinct place in the world’ and finally the ability to establish a new community or to assimilate into an existing one.57 Statelessness to Arendt is thus equally, if not more so, a conception of what it is to be without citizenship as it is to experience particular negative conditions.58 At its core, statelessness to Arendt is an experience of absence and loss: loss of public power, place and community. As Jennifer Gaffney brilliantly summarises: ‘Arendt thus conceives of citizenship not as a static and indefinitely expandable legal status, but rather as a lived and embodied activity that promises a home in the world for human beings insofar as they act in concert to remember and appropriate anew the political traditions that they have inherited’.59 It is clear that Arendt’s notion of citizenship and her view of statelessness are by no means minimal in scope — a status, which from her own lived experience, she understood to be all encapsulating, impacting one’s ontological sense of self, engagement with others and one’s ability to see oneself reflected in the public realm. This dynamic, broader description of statelessness is essential to creating a better comprehension of statelessness and subsequently enabling better redress of this phenomenon. Currently, there is a dominant bottom-up approach to framing statelessness within academia and policymakers. We are presented with the idea of ‘smoothing out the relationship between individuals and sovereign states’60 as the solution, foregoing the necessary analysis of how intra-community relationships and security are impacted by de facto statelessness. Commonly, supposed solutions to the conditions in Haiti relate to governmental actions, aid and interference, neglecting the interpersonal nature of these conditions. Though, the use of a de facto stateless lens must be utilised carefully to not replicate the paternalistic dynamic of previous studies both on the stateless and on Haiti alike, I do contend the use of the language of de facto statelessness has fruitful outcomes for the Haitian context. As Trouillot has noted when applying an ethos of mysticism and singularity to Haiti that ‘we are also being told, in varying degrees, that [Haiti] is unnatural, erratic, and therefore unexplainable. We are being told 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 Rhoda E Howard-Hassmann, ‘Introduction: The Human Right to Citizenship’ in Rhoda E Howard-Hassman and Margaret Walton-Roberts (eds), The Human Right to Citizenship: A Slippery Concept (University of Pennsylvania Press 2015) 5. ibid. Ayten Gündoğdu, Rightlessness in an Age of Rights: Arendt and the Precarious Status of NonCitizens (Oxford University Press 2015) 2. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 3) 384. ibid 387; Hannah Arendt, ‘We Refugees’ in Marc Robinson (ed), Altogether Elsewhere: Writers on Exile (Faber and Faber 1994) 110. Gaffney (n 17) 701–2. Allison Petrozziello, ‘Statelessness as a Product of Slippery Statecraft: A Global Governance View of Current Causes, Actors, and Debates’ (2019) 1(1) Statelessness and Citizenship Review 136, 137. 135