The necropolitics of statelessness: coloniality, citizenship, and disposable lives

Abstract

This article critically interrogates the unequal structures of life-saving inclusion and life-shortening exclusion that underpin modern citizenship regimes. By connecting the coloniality of citizenship framework with critical and reflexive migration studies on the nexus of death, migration, and citizenship, it introduces the concept of the necropolitics of statelessness. Bringing the works of Hannah Arendt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, Achille Mbembe, Orlando Patterson, Sylvia Wynter, and Frantz Fanon into dialogue with each other and with the work of Caribbean human rights professionals and activists, the article captures how the racialized and gendered exclusion from national membership produces deadly effects. To illustrate and support this argument, two interconnected case studies from the Caribbean are spotlighted: the 1937 Parsley Massacre, which targeted Haitians and those presumed to be of Haitian descent in the Dominican Republic, and the 2013 La Sentencia ruling, which rendered Dominicans of Haitian descent stateless and disposable. The necropolitics of statelessness is thus conceptualized as an extreme manifestation of the coloniality of citizenship, highlighting how colonial histories of violence and their present-day legacies perpetuate conditions where stateless individuals – whose very humanity is systematically denied – are subject to sovereign death-making power.