ABSTRACT
A refugee, according to Hannah Arendt, was a person who had no right to rights. Her statement was based on her own experience during the Nazi period of being stripped of German citizenship because she was a Jew. This definition of a refugee no longer holds true. In no small measure due to the lessons learned from that experience, a refugee rights regime – flawed and inadequate though it may be – has been established both at the transnational level and, in many Western liberal states, at the national level. This has enabled and legitimised substantial refugee flows and resettlements in the second half of the twentieth century. Less well known, however, are the substantial population displacements and settlements that are illicit and outside of any formal regulatory framework, which have been sustained not by the assertion of civil rights but by the ‘paper citizenship’ of weak states (Sadiq 2008) and the conditional ‘hospitality’ of shared cultural vernaculars. 1
