Arendt, Agamben and the Issue of Hyper-Legality: In Between the Prisoner-Stateless Nexus

In the Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt famously argued that the stateless were so rightless, that it was better to be a criminal who at least had some rights and protections.

In this book, Kathleen R. Arnold examines Arendt’s comparison in the context of post-1996 U.S. criminal and immigration policies, arguing that the criminal-stateless binary is significant to contemporary politics and yet flawed. A key distinction made today is that immigrant detention is not imprisonment beca...