2025 Statelessness & Citizenship Review 7(2) pollution, and flooding’ alongside the ‘absence of any semblance of urban planning’ that enabled housing destruction during the earthquake have made living conditions unbearable for participants. 106 Basic necessities are scarce in these areas, and inhabitants are particularly vulnerable to future environmental disasters or the effects of Haiti’s yearly flooding season.107 Akin to how the lack of voting in Haiti (explored further in Part VI) means citizens were unable to demand better environmental and deforestation policy, the infrastructure and environmental conditions of Haiti have a compounding effect. Citizens without voting rights are unable to demand better environmental protection and infrastructure, and the results of these bad policies –– housing insecurity, tent cities, deforestation, unemployment and more –– in turn, mitigate one’s ability to engage politically. Not just a matter of physical necessities, these conditions impact negatively upon individuals’ ability to effectuate their citizenship rights. While unable to access basic necessities, movement to exercise political rights becomes all the more inaccessible. I refer to this quote from Arendt’s Essays in Understanding to provide theoretical grounding to this effect: Just as the inhabitants of an apartment house form a group on the basis of their sharing this particular building, so we, on the strength of the political and legal institutions that provide our general living together with all the normal channels of communication, become a social group, a society, a people, a nation and so forth. And just as the apartment dwellers will become isolated from each other if for some reason their building is taken away from them, so the collapse of our institutions— the ever-increasing political and physical homelessness and spiritual and social rootlessness—is the one gigantic mass destiny of our time in which we all participate, though to very differing degrees of intensity and misery.108 This excerpt provides a useful analogy for our discussion of the impact of the earthquake and infrastructure in Haiti and their connections to de facto statelessness. Here, Arendt presents through the image of an apartment building the argument that shared institutions are what move people from individuals who simply share a space, to a collective entity: ‘a people, a nation’. 109 Just as an apartment building provides the physical foundations for a shared community, infrastructure (both physical and institutional) enables participation in society. In Haiti, the near total collapse of government institutions following centuries of colonial disenfranchisement was accelerated by environmental degradation post-earthquake and culminated in the loss of voting from 2016. Consequently, many Haitians have become functionally disconnected from the building blocks necessary to construct a meaningful political community, and without functional physical infrastructure or political institutions, are cut off from public life. This fosters a sense of rooted displacement, forcing Haitians into a state of ‘liminality’ and ‘inability to choose to belong to the communities of their birth’ as there is no such space for these communities to engage meaningfully.110 This imposes a sense of what Arendt would describe as a ‘political and physical homelessness’ on the 106 ibid 109. 107 ibid; Crane (n 96) 87. 108 Hannah Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954: Formation, Exile, and Totalitarianism, ed Jerome Kohn (Schocken Books, 6th ed, 1994) 357 (‘Arendt, “Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954”’). 109 ibid. 110 Belton (n 38) 908. 142