ABSTRACT

This chapter shifts our understanding of ‘the refugee problem’ and the search for solutions from the problem that refugees pose to states – the refugee as problem – to the problems faced by refugees in becoming displaced. To this end it examines Hannah Arendt’s well-known analysis of the structural causes of displacement within the context of her philosophical and political reflections on the ‘world’ and ‘world alienation’, to bring to light what makes this structural problem such a personal problem for those produced by it. The chapter posits that this is best understood, in Arendtian terms, as ‘worldlessness’ and ‘superfluity’. The chapter then utilises these reflections to reveal why the three durable solutions to displacement, focused as they are on formal remedies to structural rather than existential problems, are insufficient to address the problems that being a refugee presents for those forcibly displaced from their homes. This reading of her work through the idea of ‘world’ forms a theoretical base from which to begin, in the final chapter, to conceptualise ‘solutions’ to this reframed understanding of the refugee problem – solutions which place the experience of refugees at the centre of concern rather than the exigencies of the sovereign state and state system.