Tu, Kun-Feng (2022) The right of stateless peoples : reconsidering statelessness, rightlessness, and the right to have rights. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.

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Abstract

This thesis focuses on two questions: Who are stateless peoples and what are their rights. It starts with Hannah Arendt’s “methodology” of political theory so as to develop a method suitable for elaboration on these issues. With the method, the thesis finds that there is a significant lacuna in most of the existing research on statelessness and rightlessness. That is, it seems not able to account for the stateless-as-rightless problem in terms of a collective. Hence, this thesis reconsiders the problem. It contends that a stateless/rightless people, as a collective formed by its members promising to act in concert politically, is excluded from interactions with other peoples around the globe. In this way, stateless peoples refer to those peoples who perform actions under the pervasive global exclusion, e.g. Somalians, Somalilanders, Taiwanese, and the West Papuans. Their actions, nonetheless, are often misunderstood as the right to self-determination. The thesis contends that the concept of self-determination could neither fully account for the peoples’ actions nor do justice to their circumstances. Therefore, it redefines such actions, reading them as the right to have rights. That is, as what I call, to perform actions as a way of life in relation to other peoples in equal and liberal terms. In such a way, the thesis argues that (1) stateless peoples are those who act politically under the circumstances of global exclusion, and (2) their right is a performative right to live, equally and liberally, among other peoples on the Earth. The thesis aims to contribute new understandings not only to the existing literature of (human) rights theory, international legal studies on statelessness, and international political theory but to the stateless/rightless problem.

Item Type:	Thesis (PhD)
Subjects:	J Political Science > JC Political theory J Political Science > JX International law K Law [Moys] > KC International Law
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH):	Statelessness, Citizenship, Human rights
Official Date:	June 2022
Dates:	Date Event June 2022 UNSPECIFIED
Institution:	University of Warwick
Theses Department:	Department of Politics and International Studies
Thesis Type:	PhD
Publication Status:	Unpublished
Supervisor(s)/Advisor:	Page, Edward, 1968- ; Hyams, Keith, 1976-
Sponsors:	China (Republic : 1949- ). Xing zheng yuan. Xin wen ju
Format of File:	pdf
Extent:	viii, 202 pages
Language:	eng

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