Statelessness & Citizenship Review 2025 7(1) Israel’s control over Palestinian populations. 55 Such practices were sometimes perceived as legitimising Israel’s apartheid system.56 Having outlined five modes of citizenship violence, Part III considers how communities collectively resist these state practices. III A RESISTANCE Conceptualising Resistance and Agency in Statelessness Studies There are longstanding debates within the statelessness studies field as to the limits of agency of those deprived of nationality, with stateless people often conceptualised as cast outside of legal, political and social spheres and thus lacking full human agency.57 Hannah Arendt’s work on statelessness is often the starting point of conceptualisations of the stateless person within legal and political theory. 58 The human rights framework, which was developed in the aftermath of the Second World War, marked a shift in the focus of international law from an inter-state to an individual rights perspective. Arendt’s critique of this framework showed that although individuals are entitled to rights by virtue of their humanity, without access to the right to nationality they are effectively unable to realise those rights. 59 Within the international political order, states have been consolidated over time as the ‘sole legitimate organising units of global politics’.60 Stateless humans who fall outside of the state system, or do not have membership of any state, are understood as having no means through which they can directly claim their rights or seek justice and restitution. Partially drawing on Arendt’s theories of statelessness, Agamben developed the concept of ‘bare life’.61 In this concept, stateless people cast out of legal, political and social spheres and stripped of their human agency. They are reduced to a survival existence, able only to meet their bodily needs. Thus, their agency is reduced to the bare minimum. Critiques of both Arendt’s and Agamben’s work often focus on how stateless people maintain and assert their agency outside of the statist structures that 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 Nigel Parsons, ‘The Palestinian Authority Security Apparatus: Biopolitics, Surveillance, and Resistance in the Occupied Palestinian Territories’ in Elia Zureik, David Lyon and Yasmeen Abu-Laban (eds), Surveillance and Control in Israel/Palestine: Population, Territory and Power (Routledge 2011) 355; For authoritative characterisations of these systems as apartheid, see: ‘Summary of the Advisory Opinion of 19 July 2024’, Legal Consequences arising from the Policies and Practices of Israel in the Occupied Palestinian Territory, including East Jerusalem (International Court of Justice, General List No 18619 July 2024); Amnesty International, ‘Israel’s apartheid against Palestinians: a cruel system of domination and a crime against humanity’ (Report, 2022) <https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2022/02/israelsapartheid-against-palestinians-a-cruel-system-of-domination-and-a-crime-againsthumanity/>, archived at <perma.cc/K8CP-8MFQ>; S Michael Lynk, ‘Israel’s 55-year occupation of Palestinian Territory is apartheid – UN human rights expert’, Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights (Web Page, 25 March 2022) <https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2022/03/israels-55-year-occupation-palestinianterritory-apartheid-un-human-rights>, archived at <perma.cc/Q5VV-TJWP>. See Lindsey N Kingston, Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights (Oxford University Press 2019). Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Allen and Unwin, 2nd ed, 1958). ibid. Mira L Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press 2020) 6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford University Press 1998). 16