The Enduring Relevance of Arendt’s Understanding of the Harm of Statelessness James Draper Statelessness Working Paper Series No. 2016/06 Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion December 2016 Author biography James Draper is a Leverhulme Doctoral Scholar in Climate Justice at the University of Reading, whose research focuses on human migration in the context of climate change. He is currently a Youth Ambassador for the European Network on Statelessness’ #StatelessKids Campaign, and his thesis for the MA Applied Ethics at the University of Utrecht examined Arendt’s understanding of statelessness in relation to the possibility of future statelessness due to climate change in Pacific coral atoll states. Author email j.draper92@gmail.com; j.r.g.draper@pgr.reading.ac.uk Key words statelessness – citizenship – Hannah Arendt – human rights – alienation – political theory – the right to have rights Abstract This paper examines Hannah Arendt’s understanding of the harm of statelessness, exploring how it can illuminate our understanding of statelessness today. I argue that the harm Arendt identifies is two-fold, it consists in both (i) the lack of human rights protection associated with not being a citizen, and (ii) the alienation from the political community inherent in not being a citizen. I argue that the ‘right to have rights’ posited by Arendt as the appropriate response to such harms should not only be understood as being the right to access human rights x, y, and z, but should also be understood as being the right to have standing in the political community as an agent worthy of bearing such rights. Such an understanding of the ‘right to have rights’, a phrase often mobilised in discourse surrounding statelessness, can help us to engage with the problems of alienation and marginalisation facing stateless persons.