Beyond the Nation State: Rereading Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees” Eighty Years Later

2024/01/26 by Mikkel Flohr · 1 voice
Social Sciences · #Hannah Arendt's Political Philosophy

paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/07393148.2024.2303223

openalex publication_date 2024/01/26 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/21

Abstract

Abstract Hannah Arendt’s seminal yet overlooked essay “We Refugees” was written and published in Menorah Journal in 1943 while she was still a stateless refugee. In this essay, Arendt vividly describes the impossible situation that the stateless Jewish refugees faced before and during Second World War. However, Arendt does not reduce it to a series of individual tragedies, but instead develops a highly original analysis of refugees as a systematic political phenomenon that exposes the limitations of the nation-state system and simultaneously points beyond it. This analysis remains more relevant than ever today, eighty years after its initial publication.

Discussions

• My article on Hannah Arendt’s “We Refugees” is now available open-access here doi.org/10.1080/0739... [bsky, 4 points, 0 comments]

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