The Conditions of ‘Savages’? (partly) on Arendt’s arguments in ‘Imperialism’. 6 I will argue that if we want to use Arendt’s arguments to imagine a politics of stateless people that is not a contradiction in terms — that is, a politics of those whose predicament is that they have been excluded from politics — it is crucial to confront the role that race plays in these arguments. I will make a case for thinking the relationship between statelessness, politics, and race ‘with Arendt against Arendt’, taking Arendt’s repeated comparison of stateless people to ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ more seriously than Arendt does herself, by reading the passages where Arendt suggests that ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ are categories of political exclusion produced by European racism against the passages where Arendt uncritically uses ‘savages’ and ‘barbarians’ as ahistorical, paradigmatic examples of rightlessness. I aim to demonstrate that critically confronting Arendt’s comparison of stateless people to ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’ is useful for confronting the connections between statelessness, politics and race in the present. I will argue that such a critical confrontation can yield three things. First, the realisation that thinking through the politics enacted by de jure or de facto stateless people who have been forced to live in the conditions of ‘savages’ requires that we situate this politics within the history of imperialism and post-colonialism. Second, an awareness of the need to consider the connections between the political production of statelessness and the political production of race. And third, the realisation that an effective politics of people who have been forced into de jure or de facto statelessness must include a politics of anti-racism. The article consists of five Parts. Part II provides an overview of ‘Imperialism’ in order to situate ch 9 within the context of Arendt’s larger argument about law and politics after imperialism. Parts III, IV, and V develop a critical analysis of Arendt’s ambivalent use of race, by means of close readings of passages from ch 7 and 9. Part VI switches gears to discuss the politics of Amsterdam-based refugee collective We Are Here, which has been struggling against the legal and political exclusion of ‘undocumented’ people by the Dutch state, as well as protests by antiimmigrant activists since 2012. I will show why it is useful to return to Arendt’s analyses to makes sense of such examples of refugee politics in the present, but only if we critically confront Arendt’s comparison of stateless people to ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’. II THE ARGUMENT OF ‘IMPERIALISM’ Because Arendt’s diagnosis, in ch 9, of the predicament of stateless people in the mid-twentieth century is the culmination of her analysis of the nation-state in an age of imperialism, it is important not to read this chapter out of context, or to interpret it as an abstract, normative political theoretical argument, but to read it in the context of ‘Imperialism’ as a whole. ‘Imperialism’ traces what happens to spaces for politics and law after nation-states, the form that such spaces took in a considerable part of Europe after the Peace of Westphalia, expanded into empires because ‘[t]he ruling class in capitalist production came up against national 6 While most other commentators have sought to extract Arendt’s views on race from different texts, I deliberately limit my analyses to ‘Imperialism’, not only because it was published as a free-standing text, but also because it is by far Arendt’s most rigorous and extended engagement with the concept of race and because I am interested in the connections between Arendt’s writings on statelessness, politics, and race in that text. For a comprehensive analysis of Arendt’s views on race in general that gives relatively little attention to ‘Imperialism’, see Gines (n 4). 197