Statelessness

This essay was written by Siimo Kaasik, courtesy The Global Movement Against Statelessness (GMAS), a content partner of Global Voices. This post is part of Global Voices’ July 2026 Spotlight series, “.” This series offers insight into the issue of statelessness and how it hinders people’s freedom of movement, educational opportunities, political access, and more. You can support this coverage by donating .

I was 26 years old when my country disappeared.

The disappearance was literal. The Soviet Union ceased to exist. Most people witnessed its collapse through television broadcasts, newspaper headlines, and maps that suddenly required revision. I encountered it through paperwork. Paperwork, unfortunately, tends to outlive governments.

When the Soviet Union dissolved in 1991, 15 new countries emerged from its remains. Millions of people became citizens of those newly independent states. Others slipped between the cracks.

Read more: When there is no homeland: Stateless people of the former USSR

In Estonia and Latvia, the end of the Soviet Union did not simply create new countries. It also restored the citizenship that had existed before the Soviet occupation of 1940. Those who had been citizens before the occupation, and their descendants, regained citizenship automatically. Many others had to qualify through naturalization instead. Some did. Many did not. Decades later, thousands of people still live with the consequences of those decisions. I was one of them.

I was born in Tallinn, Estonia. I spoke the language. I attended school there. I worked there. I spent 26 years of my life there. Yet when Estonia restored its independence, I did not automatically become a citizen.

What followed was not a dramatic event but something far stranger. Nothing happened. My status remained unresolved for years, then decades.

People often imagine statelessness as something visible. They picture refugees crossing borders or families fleeing war. They imagine tents, checkpoints, and television cameras. The reality is quieter. It unfolds at government counters. An application asks for your nationality, yet none of the available boxes applies. A clerk studies your documents a little longer than everyone else’s. Then the file reaches a computer system built on the assumption that every human being belongs somewhere, only to encounter someone who officially belongs nowhere.

The same question followed me across continents. “What citizenship do you hold?” Sometimes it came from immigration officers. Other times from employers. Bank clerks asked it while staring at screens that seemed unwilling to accept my existence. The answer never became easier.

I learned to recognize what came next. Curiosity. Confusion. A pause. Occasionally suspicion.

Most people think about nationality the way they think about their birth date. Everyone has one. The possibility that someone might not fit that assumption creates a brief silence.

During those silences, I often felt less invisible than exposed. A stateless person becomes an unexpected complication inside systems built for efficiency. A supervisor is summoned. Documents change hands. Someone disappears into a back office. Minutes pass while everyone else continues moving forward, and your ordinary errand becomes an administrative mystery. Nobody intends cruelty. Most people simply have no idea what to do with someone who falls outside the categories their systems were built to recognize. Each delay seems insignificant. Together they become years.

Statelessness rarely arrives as a single locked door. It arrives as thousands of partially open ones. The modern world prides itself on documentation. Governments verify identities within seconds. Banks trace financial transactions across continents. Smartphones recognize faces instantly. Yet for 35 years, governments struggled with a simpler question. Who is responsible for me?

Citizenship rarely occupies anyone’s thoughts. It sits quietly in the background until a passport expires or an election arrives. It resembles plumbing. Nobody notices it until something stops working. Stateless people never have that luxury. Every institution asks the same question in a different form. Without citizenship, ordinary tasks become unexpectedly complicated. Employment opportunities narrow. International travel becomes difficult or impossible. Housing, banking, education, healthcare, and immigration procedures become exercises in explanation. You find yourself telling the same story to people who have never met anyone like you before. Most are polite. Many are confused. A few conclude you must have done something wrong. After all, how could a person not belong to a country? It sounds impossible.

Yet millions of people around the world live in precisely that condition. In the United States alone, an estimated 200,000 people may be stateless or at risk of statelessness. Their circumstances differ. Some belong to ethnic minorities denied recognition by their governments. Others fled countries that later collapsed or transformed. Still others became trapped inside legal contradictions nobody ever resolved. What unites them is uncertainty. A stateless person can spend years reporting to immigration authorities while remaining impossible to deport because no country agrees to accept them. They may follow every rule and still remain suspended between systems.

I know this because I lived it.

For more than three decades, I reported to immigration authorities in the United States. My case occupied a peculiar category. The government could not remove me, yet it could not provide a permanent solution either. Official language made the situation sound almost harmless. Terms such as “out of status” and “order of supervision” possess the comforting neutrality of office furniture. They reveal almost nothing. They cannot describe what it means to spend years unable to answer a question most people never have to consider.

Where are you from? The obvious answer is Estonia. It is where I was born, where I grew up, where my memories live. The legal answer proved far more complicated.

For 35 years, I occupied a space between countries. Long enough to watch governments come and go. Long enough to watch technology transform daily life. Long enough to watch entire generations reach adulthood. The strangest part of statelessness is not the inconvenience. It is the message buried beneath it.

Citizenship is often described as a legal status. After 35 years without one, I have come to understand it differently. It is an acknowledgment of responsibility. A passport is not merely permission to travel. It is evidence that somewhere, a government recognizes an obligation toward you. Most people receive that recognition automatically at birth and never think about it again. Stateless people spend years discovering how much of modern life depends upon it.

Stateless people are not political abstractions. They are not legal anomalies. They are not clerical problems waiting for administrative correction. They are people. They work, study, pay taxes, raise children, care for aging parents, build friendships, and contribute to the communities around them. They live ordinary lives under extraordinary uncertainty.

Thirty-five years is long enough for a child to be born, grow up, attend university, build a career, and raise children of their own. It is long enough for governments to rise and fall, for technologies to become obsolete, and for entire chapters of history to begin and end.

I did not spend 35  years searching for a country. I spent 35 years waiting for countries to decide whether I belonged to one. No person should have to wait that long.

Source: Global Voices

In short:

Australia is home to more than 8,000 stateless people, whose lack of citizenship means they struggle to access education and employment.

The persecuted Rohingya minority represent the world’s largest stateless population because the Myanmar military regime denies them nationality.

What’s next?

Migration legal experts and refugee advocates are calling for Australian law to clearly define and protect stateless people.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-24/experts-call-for-reforms-for-stateless-people-in-australia/106943738?utm_campaign=abc_news_web&utm_content=link&utm_medium=content_shared&utm_source=abc_news_web

For almost her entire life, Asma Nayim Ullah was a citizen of nowhere.

The 23-year-old was one of about 8,000 people living in Australia without holding nationality from any country.

« I know where I am from, but I’m not accepted there. »

Asma is Rohingya, a mostly Muslim ethnic minority group who represent the largest stateless population in the world due to being denied citizenship by Myanmar’s military regime since 1982.

Persecution of Rohingya has intensified in the past decade, with security forces accused of mass rapes, killings and torching thousands of homes, leading to the displacement of some 1.2 million people.

Asma grew up without official identity documents and thus had limited access to education and healthcare, faced arbitrary detention and was limited to where she could travel.

« My parents couldn’t really move from one place to another, you have to ask for permission, » she said.

The family fled Myanmar in 2013, with Asma’s parents and three siblings smuggled through Thailand, Malaysia and Indonesia, before being intercepted by Australian border authorities on a wooden boat with more than 100 other people in the Timor Sea.

Her family were detained in an onshore detention facility in Darwin, before having their asylum claims assessed and being resettled in Sydney.

Asma was 10 years old and her mother, Sajeda, was 26.

Citizenship isn’t just a passport

As a signatory to both major international statelessness treaties, Australia is expected to report the number of stateless people in its territory annually to the United Nations refugee agency.

Most stateless people living in Australia arrived seeking asylum more than a decade ago, according to research by Melbourne Law School’s Peter McMullin Centre on Statelessness.

The centre’s associate director Katie Robertson said while the federal government reported 8,183 stateless people living in Australia in 2025, the number could not be considered reliable.

« But we also know that those numbers can’t be considered as comprehensive and accurate because we don’t have a mechanism for correctly working out who actually is stateless. »

Australia does not have a uniform, legislated definition of statelessness or a formal mechanism for identifying stateless people.

Refugee Advice and Casework Services (RACS) director Sarah Dale agreed, citing the lack of a clear pathway in Australia’s immigration system for people without official identity documents.

« That is going to make it incredibly difficult for them to access visas and to apply for pathways, » she said.

Asma experienced this first-hand.

Growing up in south-west Sydney, Asma and her family relied on bridging visas for three years and temporary visas for nine years.

After graduating from high school, she was ineligible for a HECS loan and classified as an international student — for whom fees are double those for local students.

« I wasn’t able to study, » she said.

Are stateless people still arriving in Australia?

Ms Robertson said very few stateless people have arrived in Australia since the implementation of Operation Sovereign Borders in 2013, which involved intercepting and turning back asylum seeker boats.

She said complex long-term residency pathways meant stateless populations including the Rohingya — as well as Feyli Kurds, Bidoon from the Gulf States and Palestinian people who have lived in Australia, often for more than a decade — struggle to get an education and gain employment.

« The conditions they’ve been subjected to over the past decade or so have actually replicated the discrimination they faced in their country of origin, » she said.

Statelessness was often misunderstood despite its legal and personal consequences, Ms Robertson said, with the online Australian citizenship application form an example of how stateless people can fall through gaps in the immigration system.

« You have to select from a drop-down box what your country of nationality is and there’s simply no drop-down category for stateless, miscellaneous or other, » she said.

« It’s forcing people to select a nationality that’s never actually recognised them. »

Asma said this experience emulated what many Rohingya people were forced to do when identifying themselves in Myanmar.

« Sometimes the only way they can get a document is if they agree to identify differently, » she said.

« It’s very dehumanising because you don’t have a choice. »

Experts call for a national statelessness framework

Migration lawyers and refugee advocates are calling for a national framework to formally identify stateless people and provide them with a pathway to permanent residency.

Ms Robertson said Australia’s relatively small stateless population meant addressing the issue was achievable.

« We’re not talking about hundreds of thousands of people, » she said.

University of Canberra citizenship legal scholar Kim Rubenstein explained under current legislation, a person born in Australia who has never been and is not entitled to any other nationality is eligible to become an Australian citizen.

« But it doesn’t go far enough towards actually fulfilling the Statelessness Convention, » she argued.

« Amending that section to be more expansive would be a positive step for Australia’s commitment for the reduction of statelessness, »  Professor Rubenstein said.

Ms Dale of RACS agreed.

« What we would like to see is a more streamlined, coherent and definitive process for people so that their statelessness is recognised across whatever process they’re going before in Australia’s immigration and citizenship system, » she said.

The Department of Home Affairs was approached for comment.

Asma’s ‘golden year’

After living in Australia for 11 years, Asma and her family were granted Australian citizenship in May this year.

« I finally have a document that proves that I am worth as much as anyone. »

Thanks to a scholarship, she graduated from the University of Technology Sydney with dreams of entering the field of public health.

Asma’s mother Sajeda described obtaining her citizenship as feeling « newborn », with her family calling 2026 their « golden year ».

Both now identify as Australian Rohingya.

As an artist, Asma said the art she creates reflects her struggles with identity.

« I can’t be Rohingya without being Australian and I can’t be Australian without being Rohingya, » she said.

The family still worry about relatives who remain displaced in Rohingya refugee camps in Bangladesh.

Asma is the co-founder of the Australian Rohingya Women’s Development Organisation, a grassroots charity that advocates for the empowerment of Rohingya women, children and their families.

« I want to get to a position where I can make it impossible to ever make another person stateless again, » she said.

Source: ABC

The rise in the use of surrogates abroad is leaving more babies at risk of becoming stateless, experts have said, amid growing calls for urgent global regulation of the practice.

The warning follows the suspension of a 15-year effort by The Hague Conference on Private International Law (HCCH) to establish a global surrogacy convention, which was paused due to divisions among member states.

With more older women, gay couples and people affected by infertility seeking to become parents, increasing numbers of babies are being born to surrogates around the world. Surrogates normally carry pregnancies from a donor egg or the egg of someone who wishes to become a parent.

Laws differ from country to country, with some such as Italy banning the practice outright, while others, including some US states, allow commercial surrogacy. The UK only allows “altruistic” surrogacy, where surrogates cannot be paid more than their expenses from carrying the pregnancy.

UK surrogacy agencies argue that an outdated legal framework at home is pushing couples to seek surrogates abroad, where regulations to protect surrogates from exploitation can be less robust or do not exist at all. Anti-surrogacy campaigners say the practice is fundamentally abusive in all cases and are pushing for a global ban.

Prof Michael Hellner, who chaired the HCCH working group, said hugely differing opinions on the ethics of surrogacy between the member states involved meant the project to create a global framework on legal parentage in surrogacy cases had proved impossible.

“I invested 10 years of my life into this project. But if there’s no political will, there’s absolutely no point in us spending more of people’s time and money,” he said. “The lack of coordination between states on this issue leads to problems for the children, and the risk of statelessness is increasing.”

Hellner said the patchwork of cross-border surrogacy arrangements put babies at risk of “limping parentage” – where a child has different legal parents in different countries – and statelessness.

Experts said statelessness could happen in cases where a country does not automatically grant nationality to a child born there, and where surrogacy is not legally recognised in either the country of birth or the child’s final destination.

Hellner said the project had proved difficult when some countries were “violently opposed to anything that could be seen as legitimising surrogacy, which they think is a violation of human rights and dignity”.

There is no data on the number of births by surrogacy globally, but they have increased rapidly in the UK over the past decade, doubling since 2015 to more than 981 in 2025.

Most of these children were born abroad, mostly in the US, Ukraine, Nigeria, Georgia, Colombia and Mexico. British people using surrogates abroad to have babies are forced to apply to the UK family courts for a parental order to become the legal parents of their child and, in some cases, also need to apply for British citizenship for the child.

Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, the president of the Geneva-based nonprofit Child Identity Protection and a former UN special rapporteur on the sale and sexual exploitation of children, said the HCCH was a missed opportunity to have explicit international standards on the recognition of legal parentage in surrogacy, which can be a requirement for establishing nationality.

“There are lots of situations where these children are just left in a limbo and that affects their legal status, which is something that is crucial to having an identity,” she said. “The differences in legislation between different countries is still a big, big puzzle.”

The subject of international surrogacy came to prominence this week when Jens Spahn, a former German health minister and ally of the chancellor, Friedrich Merz, was forced to resign his position in his party after revealing he and his husband used a surrogate mother to become parents – a practice he had criticised in the past and his party is vehemently opposed to.

Member states involved in the HCCH included the US, UK, Australia and Canada, where surrogacy is permitted in some form, as well as France, Germany, Italy and Spain, which have heavily restricted or banned surrogacy domestically.

Bhaskar Mishra, a child protection specialist at Unicef, said the UN agency was pushing for better guidelines to protect the rights of children in international surrogacy.

“If the government doesn’t issue a passport in either the country where the baby is born, or where it is going home to, then there are chances the baby will become stateless,” he said. “That’s a serious risk in cases of international surrogacy agreements, and numbers are growing, and growing very fast.”

In 2025 a senior UK judge issued a warning about risky surrogacy arrangements abroad after a couple faced a four-year legal battle to bring two children born via surrogacy to Ukrainian women in Cyprus back to the UK, during which time they were essentially stateless.

The then president of the family division, Andrew McFarlane, said the case should act as a warning that courts may refuse to grant a parental order in cases where a child was born via commercial surrogacy abroad and this may leave the child “permanently stateless and legally parentless”.

Last year, Denmark was forced to change its laws to allow legal parentage recognition in foreign surrogacy arrangements, after the European court of human rights ruled that preventing this violated children’s rights.

The UN’s special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, Reem Alsalem, has called for surrogacy to be abolished globally, calling it a “system of violence, exploitation and abuse against women”.

Alsalem said women and girls who were “impoverished, destitute and affected by crisis and conflict” were more likely to be exploited by surrogacy arrangements, and commissioning individuals usually came from “western wealthier states”.

“The vulnerability to exploitation and abuse through surrogacy would not be possible if it were not for the existence of demand by commissioning individuals, who are usually from western wealthier states, a dynamic that reinforces colonial and discriminatory practices,” she said.

“There is a push to normalise and legalise surrogacy worldwide, given that it is lucrative and there are many strong and well-financed powerful lobbies behind it.”

Marie-Josèphe Devillers, who runs the International Coalition for the Abolition of Surrogate Motherhood (CIAMS), said she worked with surrogates who regretted their decision, and said they felt “cheated, lied to and exploited”.

One woman was a victim of human trafficking from Latin America to France, and another, from the US, said her child was sold to people other than those she had believed to be the intended parents. Devillers said she had also looked at cases where women had experienced health complications during pregnancy or birth, including some deaths.

Michael Johnson-Ellis, the founder of My Surrogacy Journey, which facilitates surrogacy in the UK, US and Mexico, said as long as it was done ethically and with proper regulation, international surrogacy worked well.

“People should be allowed to make a choice on where and how they do surrogacy, providing it’s safe and there’s no risk of people being exploited or coerced,” he said. “The wait time is about two years for a UK surrogate, and for some people who have been on a lengthy journey with infertility, that time might be something they don’t have.”

He said his agency only recommended the US and Mexico for parents seeking surrogates abroad, and was vocal in advising people on where to avoid. “We see the horror stories through the high courts of people being stuck in places like Cyprus or Georgia or Ukraine, or some of these emerging destinations that clearly are exploitative and dangerous,” he said.

Rachel Westbury is the founder of Nappy Endings, a UK-based surrogacy agency, and has been a surrogate four times since 2011. She said desperate parents were increasingly looking abroad for surrogates but the number of suitable countries was narrowing.

“People need to stop thinking that it’s just celebrities doing it and glamourising it. It’s not just for millionaires. We have people who remortgage their home to do it,” she said. “It’s a privilege to be a surrogate. If more people knew the magic of surrogacy, when it’s done right, more surrogates would come forward.”

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2026/jul/19/rise-overseas-surrogates-increases-risk-stateless-babies-experts-warn

By Sam Ben-Meir*

NEW YORK | 21 July 2026 (IDN) — In a world that proclaims human rights as universal, what does it mean that entire peoples are rendered legally nonexistent—human beings for whom, as Hannah Arendt put it, “no law exists”? This essay turns to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy of recognition to argue that the Rohingya are not only victims of a humanitarian disaster, but the site of a deeper metaphysical crisis: a systematic refusal of juridical personhood that exposes statelessness as a negation of the very conditions of moral agency. By reading Fichte alongside Arendt’s “right to have rights,” the article reveals how Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law transforms the Rohingya into the limit case of the modern moral world order and contends that recognising their rights is not mere charity but a transcendental demand of reason itself.

I. Introduction: The Moral and Philosophical Scandal of Statelessness

Few conditions so starkly expose the limits of our moral and political order as those of the stateless person. For Hannah Arendt, the refugee or stateless individual—deprived of citizenship and stripped of political belonging—reveals “the right to have rights” as the first and most fundamental of all rights.¹ The case of the Rohingya, denied citizenship under Myanmar’s 1982 Nationality Law and persecuted as an “alien” presence within their own homeland, exemplifies the deepest contradiction of modern politics: the existence of persons whom the law has rendered invisible.

To address this contradiction philosophically, we may turn to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose conception of right (Recht) as the condition of reciprocal recognition among free beings provides a powerful framework for understanding the moral catastrophe of statelessness. Though writing in the late eighteenth century, Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right anticipates the central insight of Arendt’s political thought: that human dignity depends not merely on biological existence, but on the political and juridical recognition of one’s personhood.²

Through Fichte, we can understand statelessness not only as a humanitarian tragedy but as a transcendental violation—a negation of the very conditions that make moral agency possible. This essay develops that argument in three movements: first, Fichte’s conception of recognition and right; second, the function of the state as the realization of moral freedom; and third, the resonance of these ideas with Arendt’s account of the refugee as the paradigmatic figure of modern disenfranchisement.

II. Recognition and the Conditions of Selfhood

In the Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte establishes recognition (Anerkennung) as the ground of both self-consciousness and right. The I, he insists, does not first exist in isolation and then encounter others; rather, the very possibility of self-consciousness presupposes the existence of another rational being who summons me to recognize their freedom as I demand recognition for my own.³

“The concept of a finite rational being,” Fichte writes, “implies the existence of other such beings outside it, with whom it stands in a relation of reciprocal efficacy.”⁴

This reciprocal relation is not empirical but transcendental—it is a necessary condition of moral personality. A being who is not recognized, or who cannot recognize others as free, is denied the possibility of selfhood. In this sense, recognition is not simply social esteem; it is the ontological ground of freedom.

When a people, such as the Rohingya, are stripped of legal personhood and excluded from the political community, they are denied precisely this condition of recognition. They become, in the Fichtean sense, unrealized persons—not because they lack reason or will, but because the juridical world refuses to acknowledge their agency. Their plight, then, is not merely political but metaphysical: they are deprived of the intersubjective medium through which self-consciousness achieves actuality.

Fichte’s notion of right follows directly: Right is the relation of reciprocal freedom between rational beings.⁵ It is the form of coexistence that allows each to pursue self-determination without negating the freedom of others. For this reason, right cannot be the privilege of some; it is, by definition, universal. To exclude even one rational being from the sphere of right is to negate the very concept of law.

III. The State as the Meaning of Freedom

In Fichte’s political philosophy, the state arises as the institutional embodiment of reciprocal recognition. The state is not primarily an apparatus of coercion, nor a mere social contract; it is the organ of rights, whose purpose is to secure for each member the conditions of autonomous action.

“Right,” Fichte maintains, “is possible only in a community of free beings who mutually limit their freedom according to a law they all recognize.”⁶ The state’s legitimacy therefore depends entirely on its function as the realization of freedom. A government that ceases to guarantee the equality of recognition among its members forfeits its moral standing.

In this sense, the stateless person represents an ethical contradiction: a human being without access to the community that alone can make freedom effective. The refugee exists in a liminal space where law withdraws, a zone of what Giorgio Agamben later called bare life—but the roots of that concept are already implicit in Fichte’s moral ontology.

When the state expels or refuses recognition to a group—declaring, as Myanmar has of the Rohingya, that they “do not belong”—it destroys the moral ground of its own existence. It becomes, in Fichte’s words, a “system of compulsion without right.”⁷ The expulsion of the Rohingya is thus not only a crime against a people; it is the suicide of right itself.

IV. The Moral World-Order and the Universality of Duty

Fichte’s System of Ethics deepens this argument by locating the moral imperative in the idea of an infinite moral world-order (sittliche Weltordnung). Every rational being, he writes, bears the duty to act so as to realize this moral world in the sphere of appearance.⁸ This duty transcends national boundaries; it is the obligation to treat every rational being as an end capable of freedom.

The sittliche Weltordnung thus entails a form of proto-cosmopolitanism. While Fichte is not a cosmopolitan in the Kantian sense, his ethics nonetheless points toward a universal moral community grounded in the autonomy of reason. To tolerate statelessness, therefore, is to participate in the destruction of the moral world-order. The existence of refugees is not a natural misfortune but a collective moral failure—a symptom of humanity’s inability to universalize the very principle it professes: that all rational beings are free and equal.

In Fichte’s system, moral action is the realization of freedom in the world. The ethical subject must seek to transform empirical reality until it accords with the idea of right. This imperative entails that political communities cannot rest content with partial justice. As long as there exist persons who are legally invisible, the moral task remains unfinished. The duty to the stateless is therefore not humanitarian but transcendental: it arises from the very structure of reason.

V. Arendt and the “Right to Have Rights”

Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism offers a twentieth-century counterpart to Fichte’s analysis. In her chapter on “The Decline of the Nation-State and the End of the Rights of Man,” Arendt observes that the refugees of the interwar period—Jews, Armenians, and others—revealed a profound truth: human rights, when divorced from political membership, are empty.

The stateless person, she writes, lost “not the right to freedom, but the right to action; not the right to think, but the right to opinion.”⁹ For Arendt, this loss demonstrates that rights depend on belonging to a political community—on being recognized as part of a world where one’s words and actions count. The refugee is the being “from whom the world has withdrawn.”¹⁰

This insight converges with Fichte’s: for both, the human person exists only within a structure of reciprocal recognition. Arendt’s “right to have rights” is, in effect, the modern translation of Fichte’s doctrine that selfhood requires acknowledgement within a lawful community. The moral crisis of statelessness thus appears as a philosophical catastrophe: a regression to a pre-juridical state where persons are reduced to biological existence.

For Arendt, the totalitarian state begins precisely when it creates populations outside the law—when it produces superfluous men, human beings without a polity.¹¹ The Rohingya, confined to camps and stripped of citizenship, embody this superfluity. Their condition is not accidental but structural, the consequence of a world order that still defines rights in terms of the nation-state.

VI. The Fichtean Critique of Nationalism

Fichte’s own political thought oscillates between cosmopolitan moralism and national particularism, especially in the Addresses to the German Nation. Yet even here, his nationalism is moral, not ethnic. Fichte conceives the nation as an educative community whose purpose is to cultivate universal freedom.¹²

A nation that defines itself through exclusion or racial purity, he would argue, betrays its own vocation. “Every people,” Fichte writes, “is destined to form itself into a complete and harmonious whole, a member of humanity which acts in freedom.”¹³ The nation’s legitimacy, then, depends on its service to humanity, not its withdrawal from it.

From this standpoint, the ethnic nationalism of Myanmar represents the perversion of the very idea of the state. A government that denies recognition to a segment of its population ceases to be a member of the moral world-order. It becomes, in Fichtean terms, a mechanism of domination devoid of right.

Indeed, Fichte’s insistence that right cannot exist for some without existing for all leads inexorably toward a universalist politics. If recognition is the ground of selfhood, and if right is the relation of mutual recognition among rational beings, then the full realization of right requires a cosmopolitan order. The plight of the Rohingya thus discloses not merely the failure of a state, but the incompleteness of the global moral order itself.

VII. The Stateless as the Limit of the Moral World

In both Fichte and Arendt, the stateless person occupies a liminal zone between humanity and non-being. For Fichte, the absence of recognition means that the individual cannot appear as a free agent in the world; for Arendt, it means the loss of a common world altogether.

The refugee, then, becomes the symptom of a deeper metaphysical disorder: the disjunction between the universality of reason and the particularity of political forms. Fichte’s philosophy helps us see that this disorder is not contingent but intrinsic to the modern system of states, which continues to define belonging in terms of national identity rather than universal right.

Yet Fichte also offers a path toward transcendence. His ethics of the moral world-order demands that we act to overcome every empirical limitation that contradicts the idea of universal freedom. This imperative entails the creation of political institutions capable of guaranteeing recognition to all persons, irrespective of national origin. In this sense, Fichte prefigures what we might call a transcendental cosmopolitanism: not an empirical federation of states, but a moral duty to construct a world in which the concept of right truly becomes universal.

VIII. Conclusion: Recognition as the Measure of Humanity

In the end, Fichte’s philosophy enables a radical critique of statelessness as both a moral and metaphysical affront. To deny recognition to a human being is to negate the very possibility of a moral world. The Rohingya, like the countless stateless peoples before them, are not merely victims of political exclusion; they are witnesses to the fragility of the moral order itself.

Through Arendt’s eyes, we see that the modern state, when it creates human beings without rights, approaches the threshold of totalitarianism. Through Fichte’s eyes, we see why: because it has severed the bond of recognition that makes freedom real.

To affirm the rights of the stateless is not an act of charity but of philosophical consistency. If reason and freedom are universal, then the conditions that make them effective—the juridical and political forms of recognition—must also be universal. The moral world-order demands no less.

Until the day when every rational being is recognized as such within a lawful community, the task of right remains unfinished. The plight of the Rohingya stands as a call to realize what Fichte named the highest vocation of humanity: to transform the empirical world until it reflects the idea of freedom itself.

<sup>1. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1951), 296.↩
2. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Foundations of Natural Right, trans. Frederick Neuhouser (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35–38.↩
3. Ibid., 37.↩
4. Ibid., 42.↩
5. Ibid., 45–46.↩
6. Ibid., 47.↩
7. Ibid., 50.↩
8. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, System of Ethics, trans. Daniel Breazeale and Günter Zöller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 110–115.↩
9. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, 295.↩
10. Ibid., 297.↩
11. Ibid., 300.↩
12. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Addresses to the German Nation, trans. Gregory Moore (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 26–28.↩
13. Ibid., 49.↩</sup>

*Sam Ben-Meir teaches philosophy at the City University of New York, College of Technology. He is the author of Ethical Interanimality: Toward a Relational Philosophy of Nature (Westphalia Press, 2026). [IDN-InDepthNews]

Source: https://indepthnews.net/recognition-right-and-the-stateless-a-fichtean-critique-of-the-plight-of-the-rohingya/

Rohingya girls lured by ‘bridal journeys’ across the Bay of Bengal vanish on deadly sea routes, as families pushed by hunger and fear turn to traffickers posing as matchmakers.

This story written by Zulker Naeen originally appeared on Global Voices on July 21, 2026.

In 1962, Parliament amended Malaysia’s Constitution and made sweeping changes to the citizenship law.

Malaysia moved away from jus soli – citizenship based on place of birth – and adopted jus sanguinis, citizenship based on descent, as the overriding criterion for nationality.

Source

First published: Jan 18, 2026