Rethinking Statelessness from Within Haitian populace, limiting participation and access to physical and political rights.111 With Arendt’s above excerpt in mind, theorising can help us understand that though possessing legal nationality and inhabiting the same spaces, the Haitian populace is deprived of functioning citizenship by virtue of the loss of the social and political infrastructure that supports citizenship’s effectuation. This piece makes the important contribution of framing the failures of Haiti’s government not as a simple issue of a state that must move towards the Westphalian model, but as a series of conditions that restrict the meaningful fulfilment of one’s citizenship. It would be a misnomer to suggest that anyone living in such conditions is empowered to fully enact the activities of citizenship. Citizenship is both access to rights and the active participation in their engagement. Per Arendt’s famous dictum that citizenship entails the ‘right to have rights’,112 it is not enough to say that one has citizenship in the possessive sense. Rather, one must have citizenship as if it were a verb; something to be enacted, performed and enjoyed. Examining Haiti through this perspective shifts focus from top-down conceptions of governance to underscoring how the degradation of physical and communal infrastructure restricts Haitians from meaningful political and legal belonging. Viewing Haiti through this lens reveals how even people who are technically citizens can be rendered effectively stateless within their own country when the structures governing their existence do not serve to protect their rights to place, purpose and political engagement. Returning to the Arendt quote analysed above, without the foundations for a communal, political existence, Haitians are not empowered to become members of a group (as citizens are to be members of a nation) and are thus de facto stateless. As Benedicty states, the routine political turmoil in Haiti, followed by the shocks of natural hazards means those in the state identify with a ‘dismal quasi-non-citizenship’ caused by living in a constant ‘state of exception’.113 In fact, when a population is forced to exist within a constant emergency response scenario, their right to a place is violated both in ‘the sense of geographic location as well as belonging’. 114 The Haitian case exemplifies this issue. While earthquake victims ‘theoretically’ have the rights we associate with nationality, in practice, their Haitian nationality did little to ensure the effective exercise of such rights, therefore leaving earthquake victims de facto stateless. 115 The experience of Haitians post-2010 earthquake adheres to the definition of de facto statelessness, both in a top-down and a bottom-up perspective. That is, the inability of the Haitian government to effectively mitigate the administrative harms of the disaster represent a disconnect between citizen and state, while the sense of instability and precarity this imposed on its people encapsulates a lack of security inherent to our belonging within a state. These phenomena and the precarity they invoke imply a sense of de facto statelessness in Haiti that we must work to better understand in future research. 111 112 113 114 115 Arendt, Essays in Understanding, 1930-1954 (n 108) 357. Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (n 3) 388. Benedicty (n 78) 17. Kingston (n 27) 9. Thomaz (n 84) 36; Batchelor (n 88) 168. 143