The Expansion of Statelessness: Human Rights and Migrant Labour in Globalising Times

Abstract

The phenomenon of statelessness has long served as one of the most fundamental challenges to the validity and utility of human rights law as a political project. Agamben (2000) claims that statelessness signifies a ‘radical crisis’ for human rights law, in that it reveals its fundamental inability to protect, or even conceive of, any human being outside of the nation-state system. However, the normative understandings of the concept have remained largely static since it was first discussed in Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1976). In this thesis I argue that the sociopolitical changes brought about by neoliberal globalisation have expanded the meaning of statelessness in its present day manifestations, and that such changes have deepened that 'radical crisis' for human rights law. This thesis concentrates on changes to the role and function of the nation-state, and the increasing prominence of capitalist non-state actors in the global political economy to argue that the concept of statelessness today has a wider scope than ever before. In addition, it argues that the situation of temporary migrant workers constitutes a new form of statelessness, as evidenced in the construction projects of the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.