This paper addresses the limitations of regional and international advocacy that has endeavoured to counteract statelessness and strived to determine solutions to the plight of stateless peoples in the post-colonial context. Central to the issue of statelessness is the presumption of an active and mutually-beneficial relationship between the state and the individual, which in turn is regarded as essential for the protection and promotion of [human] rights. In cases of both de facto and de jure statelessness, however, this form of political membership is either perpetually elusive or entirely missing. Expanding on the idea of denizenship (Benton 2014), this article contends that membership exists along a spectrum, and, statelessness as a common form of dispossession requires attention to the functionality of the triangular relationship between the state, the society and the individual rather than the myopic focus on the state-citizen duo. Although governmentsponsored identities continue to be a prerequisite for rights protection in the grid-like structure of the modern state system, functional membership requires us to expand our understanding of collective human responsibility regardless of the citizenship status of those who are exposed to violence of precarity and denial of rights. As such, the article proposes that we critically examine the standard reading of Hannah Arendt s work dictating the ways individuals are recognized as worthy of rights or denied even the most basic protections on account of their absence in the roster of political membership (Arendt 1958, 1968, 2003).2 We must push the discussion on dispossession beyond the thin notions of citizenship and reformulate the issue of membership to dispossession, and the period from 1985 onwards introducing the options of safe return, accompanied by the global embrace of temporary protection on the one hand, and, extreme forms of the juridifcation of refugee crises, on the other. 2 The difficulties and reversals that mark interpretations of Hannah Arendt's idea of a right to have rights, (1968, 177-178) and in particular the foundational understanding of politics the standard interpretation of her work on rights presuppose are worthy of a brief note here. The most conventional interpretation considers the right to have rights in terms of the use of power to implement rights in institutional terms. However, Arendt s broadl Kantian interpretation understands it in terms of the positionality of rights-claimants or rights-holders themselves (O Neill 2001, Benhabib 2004). In its most demanding and expansive rendition, it could fully honor the emphasis on autonomy and thus does not have to be anchored in the nation-state per se and is not bound by the conventional universalist frame of rights. Throughout this work, this is the reading I adhere to. For a similar debate, see Oman 2010. 2