Recognition, right, and the stateless: A Fichtean critique of the plight of the Rohingya

Recognition, right, and the stateless: A Fichtean critique of the plight of the Rohingya

In a world that proclaims human rights as universal, what does it mean that entire peoples are rendered legally nonexistent—human beings for whom, as Hannah Arendt put it, “no law exists”? This essay turns to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy of recognition to argue that the Rohingya are not only victims of a humanitarian disaster, but the site of a deeper metaphysical crisis: a systematic refusal of juridical personhood that exposes stateless…