2025 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 7(2) that Haiti is so special that modes of investigation applicable to other societies are not relevant here’.61 Framing in terms of de facto statelessness as the antithesis for functioning citizenship allows us to consider groups previously neglected by statelessness studies and while working to overcoming this ‘Othering’ of the Haitian experience. Per Arendtian theorist Steve Buckler, only after bettering our account of phenomena in a way that is attuned to the human-centric and political dimensions can we change the outcome.62 He states, ‘to reflect upon the political in its fully contingent and circumstantial character, and thereby to understand better the potentialities and pitfalls of our ability to act in ways that are spontaneous, and which can make a difference to our world’.63 For those in Haiti, a more reflective account of their lived reality is the first step for creating better outcomes. Without such understanding, any developments would continue to be unresponsive to the specific injuries of this community. Such is the value of this article, where Haiti’s history of ill-fated interventions demands reinvigorated political theorising on the conditions within the nation. With Arendt’s conception of statelessness in mind — one which emphasises the innately relational, emotional and disruptive effect that a loss of home, community and rights has on the individual — a more human-centric lens can be curated for the sake of examining the Haitian context in the 21st century. A Rooted Displacement Arendt’s concept of statelessness, for which she is primarily describing the de facto stateless, is clearly a human-centric and emotional concept. She leverages concepts of loneliness, isolation and loss of community as central to her lived understanding of what it means to be stateless. To help further these intangible concerns of Arendt, I make use of Belton’s concept of ‘rooted displacement’64 as a further indicator of de facto statelessness in addition to the loss of public rights and spaces alongside the loss of community felt by those in Haiti as a case study. The canonical image of a stateless person is culturally migratory, transient and an outsider. Certainly, there are many stateless people whose outsider status is a result of movement between one country to another. However, in situ statelessness, referring to those who are without nationality in the country of their birth or longterm residence, represents a large portion of those who are stateless.65 Belton defines rooted displacement as the paradoxical condition in which stateless individuals remain physically rooted in their country of birth yet experience a form of forced displacement due to their unbelonging and lack of legal recognition.66 Unlike refugees or asylum seekers who cross borders, stateless people are immobile but are still ‘displaced in situ’ — excluded from the rights, 61 62 63 64 65 66 Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘The Odd and the Ordinary: Haiti, the Caribbean and the World’ (2020) 17 Vibrant: Virtual Brazilian Anthropology 1, 3. Steve Buckler, Hannah Arendt and Political Theory: Challenging the Tradition (Edinburgh University Press, 1st ed, 2011). ibid 5. See Belton (n 38). Caia Vlieks, ‘Understanding Statelessness: What Are the Different Contexts of Statelessness in Europe’, European Network on Statelessness (Web Page, 14 September 2017) <https://www.statelessness.eu/updates/blog/understanding-statelessness-what-are-differentcontexts-statelessness-europe>, archived <perma.cc/6WUN-PZ9B>. Belton (n 38) 907–8. 136