The term “after” in the title Statelessness after Arendt. European Refugees in China and the Pacific During the Second World War can be read in two ways. The first suggests a following, as in following in the tradition of. The second implies a novel reading of statelessness in the wake of political philosopher Hannah Arendt’s defining work on the subject. This edited collection, the product of extensive research on individual cases and a desire to extend Arendt’s analysis of statelessness beyond inter-war Europe, seeks to do both. The result is a fascinating and important, if somewhat uneven, intervention on the nature of statelessness during World War II.

Contributors to the volume engage with a range of Arendt’s works in thinking through issues of statelessness. Consequently, readers are exposed to her writing in seminal works such as “We Refugees” (1943), The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), and The Human Condition (1958). Contributors rightly point out the crucial ways in which Arendt’s understanding of the world, including her own experience of statelessness and that of others (most notably in the wake of World War I), were shaped by her understanding of the nature of political power, and especially state–citizen relations, in the West. The question of how Arendt’s ideas translate into other contexts is therefore an important undertaking. Insights into the nature of state power in China (where Rana Mitter, for instance, describes the Chinese state as a “work in progress”, p. 107) and other parts of Asia and the Pacific provide insights into the question of power, authority, and statelessness that sit at the heart of Arendt’s diagnoses of state cruelty.

The volume is divided into three sections with cross-cutting themes around the agency of individuals and communities in the face of state power that robbed people of citizenship, led to their forced displacement, and constrained their capacity for free decision-making in the face of coerced movement. The first section introduces the significance of Arendt’s work on statelessness (as lived experience and a product of the move towards totalitarianism in the interwar period) through a dialogue between editor Jay Winter and Peter Gatrell (who also contributes a revealing chapter on the stories snapshotted within individual case files created by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)). The intent is to immediately highlight the possibilities and limitations of using Arendt’s work about statelessness beyond the European context.

The second section highlights the perspective and voices of non-state actors through the inclusion and analysis of poetry and photography by Peter Balakian and Mary Behrens, as well as personal reflections. This section foregrounds intimate experiences of displacement and statelessness, as Eva de Jong-Duldig recalls her family’s multiple displacements and Joy Damousi explores familial histories and negotiations around memory and storytelling.

The volume then moves to an analysis of various aspects of the histories of statelessness and refuge in China and the Pacific during World War II. Some contributions deal fully with Arendt’s political philosophy, and in particular her work on statelessness and refugees, while other contributions serve more as empirical background to the workings of state actors and humanitarian organizations. There is a great deal of material to consider, from multiple perspectives. Sheila Fitzpatrick’s contribution on Russian refugees in Harbin (which she uses to nuance Arendt’s perspective that “statelessness was the worst of all possible worlds”, p. 145) and Gao Bei’s research on the Japanese occupation are particularly illuminating. So, too, is work that considers the aftermath of war and statelessness, such as Seumas Spark’s analysis of migration from Shanghai to Australia.

Together, the contributions to this edited collection encourage readers to consider the nature of resistance in the face of state power, the lived experience of stateless people, and the authority and agency of individuals and communities in this regard. One of the volume’s most important interventions is to nuance Arendt’s stark analysis of what it meant to be deprived of rights. Several contributors return to the oft-quoted excerpt from The Origins of Totalitarianism in which Arendt declares: “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human.” However, they return to it precisely in order to suggest a more complicated understanding of the making and experience of statelessness in the context of World War II. Collectively, contributors seek to nuance Arendt’s understanding of state power as well as the ways in which this authority was experienced and mitigated. This intervention is both important and timely given current contests over citizenship and undocumented migration. It also highlights further areas for theorization and research.

The first subject that might be explored further is the relationship between component parts of modern nation states and the experience of statelessness, in particular the role of cities vis-à-vis national authorities. As an open port, the city of Shanghai played host to thousands of European refugees in the twentieth century, including people fleeing the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia and persecution in Nazi Germany. Cities therefore appear on multiple occasions throughout the collection. Meredith Oyen, for instance, situates the local politics of refuge in the city against broader state and international refugee resettlement efforts. Oyen specifically describes the city of Shanghai as “a haven for new Jewish refugees from Europe” (p. 111). The fact that Shanghai is a city and not a state is an invitation for a broadened line of inquiry to nuance studies of statelessness. However, with the exception of a brief invocation of Henri Lefebvre’s notion of the “right to the city” in Qian Zhu’s compelling chapter, there is little discussion of the city as a framework of analysis or a potential mediator in the starkly drawn dichotomy between state power and stateless people. Given the emergence of “cities of refuge” or “sanctuary cities” in the context of the transnational 1980s sanctuary movement or the International Cities of Refuge for persecuted writers in the 1990s, future research might consider the roles of cities, such as the open port city of Shanghai, in mitigating state authority and shaping migrant agency historically.

In interrogating the nature of statelessness in a non-European context, Statelessness after Arendt offers a rich comparative history. This approach hints at the possibility of of furthering studies of statelessness beyond the West by considering how histories of statelessness were connected or entangled (reflecting what Michael Werner and Bénédicte Zimmerman describe as histoire croisée). Research that foregrounds the entangled connections of statelessness in a global context might build on chapters by Jay Winter and Kolleen Guy who explore educational institutions and humanitarian work in distinct geographical contexts. A connective or entangled approach might also consider the impact of what people carried with them in terms of social, political, ideological, and cultural mores and their role in transforming the very contexts in which they were displaced. It might also attend more fully to simultaneous and parallel processes in Asia that also rendered people stateless. For instance, there is opportunity to consider the movement of European refugees alongside full histories of displacement in Asia (e.g. the Civil War in China and the expansion and contraction of the Japanese empire, which caused extensive displacement and rendered thousands of people stateless). An entangled approach could advance the intellectual project of moving Arendt’s discussions of statelessness beyond the European context by focusing on broader the imperial and colonial forces that shaped statelessness in various parts of the world, including Asia. There is a growing body of work on statelessness in this region (see Jamie Liew, Ghost Citizens: Decolonial Apparitions of Stateless, Foreign and Wayward Figures in Law (Halifax, 2024) that invites further research to connect histories of statelessness more fully in terms of geography, politics, and the relationship between the past and present.

Statelessness after Arendt demonstrates the value of documenting how people’s movements were bound up with the politics of the state, and statelessness as a phenomenon, in multiple geographic contexts. It will be of interest to scholars of political philosophy, refugee history, totalitarianism, China, Asia, and the Pacific. Statelessness after Arendt also reveals the challenges involved in moving beyond distinctive geographic frames to understand the phenomenon of statelessness. Future work might continue to fully distill the crucial ways in which individuals and communities, along with their supporters and advocates, have navigated the bewildering, though not entirely totalizing, experience of statelessness at multiple scales and in varied geographic contexts.