THE CONDITIONS OF ‘SAVAGES’? STATELESSNESS, POLITICS AND RACE IN HANNAH ARENDT’S THE ORIGINS OF TOTALITARIANISM MICHIEL BOT * This article explores the ways in which race enters our analyses of statelessness when we build those analyses (partly) on Hannah Arendt’s arguments in ‘Imperialism’. Through close readings of Arendt’s ambivalent use of race in this text, the article demonstrates that critically confronting Arendt’s repeated comparison of stateless people to ‘barbarians’ and ‘savages’ is useful for confronting the connections between statelessness, politics and race in the present. The article argues 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. TABLE OF CONTENTS I II III IV V VI Introduction........................................................................................................... 195 The Argument of ‘Imperialism’ ............................................................................ 197 Political Mechanisms of Dehumanisation: Arendt’s Ambivalence about ‘Savages’ ..................................................................................................... 200 ‘A Peculiar State of Nature’.................................................................................. 203 Thinking the Politics of Countering Statelessness with Arendt against Arendt: The Dark Background of Mere Givenness ........................................................... 206 Thinking With We Are Here................................................................................. 208 I INTRODUCTION Since the 1990s, ch 9 of Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism has been a locus classicus for scholars of statelessness, who keep returning to its analysis of the predicament of stateless people and refugees as a condition of exclusion from political participation, its critique of human rights and its famous conception of a ‘right to have rights’. 1 However, these scholars have paid little attention to Arendt’s repeated comparison of stateless people and refugees to ‘barbarians’ and, of their conditions, to the conditions of ‘savages’. This lack of attention is surprising, because ch 9 is the culmination of a 180-page analysis of European imperialism (Part 2 of The Origins of Totalitarianism, which was also published * 1 I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their thorough engagement with this article. I would also like to thank my colleagues in the Jurisprudence and Legal Philosophy research seminar at Tilburg University for their comments, as well the audience of the 2018 conference of the Association for Political Theory at Haverford and Bryn Mawr colleges, where I presented an earlier version of this article. Above all, I would like to thank the members of We Are Here, especially Hashim, for discussing their experiences and their politics with me, and for their hospitality. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, new ed, 1976) ch 9.