The Right to Have Rights: Negotiating Non/Citizenship & Rights

Rooted in Hannah Arendt’s 1946 concept of “The Right to Have Rights,” this course will focus on the ways in which the 21st century emergence of states and nationalities globally created both structured approaches to citizenship, along with a wide range of permissions and restrictions governing it.

Course content will focus closely on laying out and analyzing definitions and categories assigned to full, partial, and non-citizen populations–stateless, refugee, green card holder, undocumented, second class citizen, native, asylum seeker, etc. These examples will be drawn from global cases–with particular emphasis on border and citizenship formation as part of nation-building after empire, as part of crafting nationality in settler colonial contexts, in terms of racial hierarchies of citizenship, and in terms of post WWII and post colonial independence and the impacts of citizenship on global and regional mobility and rights regimes granted to different populations.  

This is a global course that will draw on case-based, historical, and current examples from at least four different continents, and a range of countries including the United States. It will similarly include institutional, legal, administrative, and regulatory aspects or rights regimes at both the level of national immigration administration and the international level of frameworks, treaties, and organizations related to migration governance and rights.