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

This article revisits and reinterprets Hannah Arendt seminal but overlooked essay “We Refugees,” which was published in Menorah Journal in 1943, while she was still a stateless refugee. The essay vividly describes the impossible situation of the stateless Jewish refugees before and during the Second World War. I show that Arendt drew on the work of Bernard Lazare to develop an highly original analysis of the refugees as a political phenomenon, which exposes the limitations of the nation state system and simultaneously points beyond it. I argue that this analysis remains acutely relevant today, eighty years after its initial publication.