People Without a Country

Statelessness, Sovereignty, and the Limits of Today’s Political and Moral Order

“Breathes there the man, with soul so dead,

Who never to himself hath said,

This is my own, my native land?”

With those unforgettable lines, Walter Scott gave voice to one of modern political life’s deepest instincts: the longing to belong—to inherit a home that claims you, to be rooted in a shared past, a common soil, a collective “we.”

Scott’s verses are often read as a Romantic celebration of patriotism. But they also carry an implicit warning: to be without a native land is not simply to be lonely. It is to be cut loose from the basic structure through which the modern world grants recognition, rights, dignity, and protection.

The man without a country appears repeatedly in poems and parables, exile literature and moral fables—a figure severed from belonging, stripped of civic standing, condemned not only to displacement but to a deeper kind of invisibility. He has no home the world is obliged to acknowledge, no political community that must claim him.

In the 19th century, as in Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man Without a Country,” such a figure could seem exceptional: a solitary outcast, cast adrift by betrayal or fate. The 20th century revealed something darker. The man without a country was not an anomaly. He was everywhere.

The modern international order is built around states. It speaks the language of universal rights but operates through the hard architecture of sovereignty: passports, borders, armies, and treaties.

To have a country is to have political existence. To lack one is to inhabit a world where sympathy may be offered but protection is uncertain—where rights are proclaimed yet fragile.

Hannah Arendt, reflecting on the refugees of interwar Europe, called statelessness the most elemental deprivation: the loss not simply of freedom, but of “the right to have rights.” Statelessness was not just exile. It was expulsion from political membership itself.

And it remains one of the enduring conditions of our time.

The Kurds are perhaps the clearest example: tens of millions with a shared language and history, divided among four states, alternately courted and crushed, visible when militarily useful and invisible when politically inconvenient. Their fate reveals an inconvenient truth: the world does not easily recognize peoples. It recognizes states.

The same truth haunts the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. Zionism emerged from the recognition that minorities living at the mercy of others are never fully secure—that without sovereignty, a people can be persecuted or annihilated. Palestinians, living for generations under occupation and in political limbo, have drawn a parallel conclusion: without a state, they will remain permanently negotiable, their status managed rather than resolved.

Both Jews and Palestinians, in different ways, have learned the same brutal lesson: the stateless are always vulnerable.

To speak of statelessness, then, is to confront one of modern history’s central tragedies: that dignity has been made contingent on sovereignty, and that the international order—however universal its rhetoric—continues to treat those without a state as unfinished, expendable, and easily ignored.

In our own time, the more urgent question may be: what becomes of peoples the world refuses to fully recognize?

A Celebration Without a State

In March 2024, Kurds across Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran marked Nowruz/Newroz, the spring festival of renewal.

In Diyarbakır, celebrations took place under heavy security, with authorities detaining participants and prosecuting some for alleged “terror propaganda.”

In Iraqi Kurdistan, Nowruz remained an official holiday, even as economic strain and political division continued to cloud the region’s stability.

In northeastern Syria, Kurdish festivities unfolded amid the broader uncertainty of an unfinished political settlement and dependence on outside protection.

And in Iran, Nowruz gatherings again carried political sensitivity, as authorities often view public celebration—especially in Kurdish regions—through the lens of security and dissent.

The same people, the same tradition, four different states—none of them Kurdish. This is what statelessness looks like in practice: a people present across borders, but without sovereignty. Celebrations permitted or prohibited at the discretion of others. Cultural continuity maintained despite, not because of, the political order.

The Kurdish experience is not unique. It reveals a governing truth of the modern world: the international order does not truly recognize peoples. It recognizes states.

It recognizes flags, borders, ministries, armies, treaties, diplomatic standing, seats at the United Nations. It recognizes sovereignty: the capacity to act, to defend, to compel recognition. It does not easily know what to do with peoples that lack these things.

Stateless peoples exist in a kind of political shadow—present as human beings, absent as collective subjects.

The Structure of Non-Recognition

Statelessness is not simply the absence of a flag. It is a condition of radical vulnerability and incomplete recognition that exposes the deep structure of modern political life.

The distinction is crucial. There is moral recognition—acknowledging a people’s humanity—and there is political recognition—acknowledging their capacity for collective agency and self-determination. The modern world has achieved the first far more successfully than the second. Stateless peoples may receive sympathy, even aid. But they are rarely recognized as political subjects with legitimate claims to sovereignty.

This is the paradox Hannah Arendt identified at the heart of human rights: rights become most urgent precisely when people lose political membership, yet at that very moment they become least enforceable. Arendt called this the loss of “the right to have rights”—the recognition that rights are not simply natural possessions but political achievements requiring institutional backing and coercive power.

To lack a state is to lack that scaffolding. International law can proclaim principles, but it cannot reliably enforce them for those without sovereignty. Statelessness reveals the fragility of universalism: moral claims without political standing dissolve in crisis.

Hegel understood recognition as foundational to political existence. To be fully a person is to be acknowledged as a bearer of standing and capable of reciprocal relations. Stateless peoples are not unrecognized as human beings, but they remain unrecognized as collectives. They do not appear as sovereign interlocutors. Instead, they are treated as minorities, security problems, or humanitarian cases—objects of others’ decisions.

This is not merely a technical deficit but an existential condition. As Charles Taylor argues, recognition is a necessity: identities are shaped through how others see us. To be perpetually regarded as dependent or provisional is to be diminished as a people. Statelessness is not only political exclusion; it is a kind of ontological impoverishment.

Living in Permanent Insecurity

Stateless peoples exist not only in the political shadows but in temporal suspension. They lack political continuity—the ability to plan, build, and transmit across generations with reasonable security.

Sovereignty provides a long-term horizon: the ability to educate children in a legitimate language, build institutions meant to last, cultivate land with confidence in inheritance, imagine a future anchored in the past. Statelessness, by contrast, means perpetual contingency. Schools may be closed, languages banned, autonomy revoked, allies transformed into enemies. There is no stable horizon—only cycles of hope and betrayal.

The Kurds have lived this pattern repeatedly: uprisings abandoned, gains reversed, autonomy crushed. The lesson is brutal but clear: without sovereignty, nothing is secure. Every achievement is provisional. Every generation must fight the same battles anew.

This temporal vulnerability is why statehood is not only about present safety but about future possibility

The Historical Origin: Empire’s Collapse and the Nation-State Trap

To understand statelessness historically, one must return to the early 20th century, when imperial pluralism gave way to national sovereignty—a shift that transformed the meaning of political legitimacy.

The Ottoman Empire, like other empires, governed diversity through hierarchy, local autonomy, and layered forms of belonging. The millet system granted religious and ethnic communities substantial self-rule in law, education, and culture. The arrangement was often unjust and coercive, but it did not assume that every people required its own state. Empires were multinational by design, managing difference through accommodation as well as repression.

The collapse of empire after World War I inaugurated something radically new: the attempt to rebuild political order around national self-determination. Woodrow Wilson promised a world in which peoples would govern themselves—what he called “universal self-determination.” The reality was far different.

Borders were drawn less by ethnographic justice than by strategic calculation and colonial bargaining—Sykes–Picot, mandates, protectorates, and minority containment. The modern Middle East was not the fulfillment of national aspirations but a great-power compromise imposed on top of plural societies. The result was not a world of nations but a world of states—and not every people received one.

The Kurds became the clearest remainder: too numerous to erase, too inconvenient to recognize, too divided to claim Wilson’s promised self-determination. The Treaty of Sèvres (1920) gestured toward Kurdish autonomy, perhaps even independence. The Treaty of Lausanne (1923) erased that possibility, definitively partitioning Kurdish lands among Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Iran.

The tragedy of stateless peoples begins here: the nation-state system universalized the principle of sovereignty while distributing it unevenly. Self-determination became the proclaimed ideal—and the denied reality.

The Interwar Failure: Minority Protection Without Enforcement

Between the world wars, the international community attempted an alternative: minority protection treaties under the League of Nations. These guaranteed cultural and religious rights to vulnerable groups inside the new states of Eastern Europe.

The experiment failed catastrophically. Minority protections without sovereign enforcement proved hollow. Host states viewed the treaties as infringements on their authority, minorities remained exposed to majoritarian politics, and the League lacked the power to compel compliance. When nationalism radicalized and crisis deepened, the guarantees evaporated.

The Holocaust demonstrated with horrific clarity what Hannah Arendt would later theorize: international assurances mean little without sovereign refuge. European Jews possessed legal rights, cultural autonomy, even prosperity in some settings. None of it prevented extermination.

This precedent taught a generation of stateless peoples a brutal lesson: humanitarian principles and international law cannot substitute for sovereignty. The lesson was learned in blood.

The Post-1945 Paradox: Self-Determination Proclaimed, Sovereignty Frozen

The postwar international order enshrined two principles in uneasy tension: self-determination and territorial integrity. The United Nations affirmed the right of peoples to govern themselves while also protecting existing state borders from disruption.

This contradiction was managed through decolonization. Colonial territories could become independent states, their often arbitrary borders granted international recognition. Self-determination applied largely to colonies, not to peoples already contained within recognized states.

The result was a system that created dozens of new countries while abandoning peoples whose lands were already claimed. The principle was applied selectively: acceptable when it dismantled European empires, unacceptable when it threatened postcolonial borders.

Kurds, Palestinians, Tibetans, and others became permanent exceptions to a supposedly universal right. They learned that self-determination was not a guarantee but a historically contingent opportunity—available to some, foreclosed to others.

The international system thus froze the status quo. It protected borders more consistently than peoples and defended sovereignty more reliably than justice. It speaks the language of universalism while operating through particular powers.

Varieties of Statelessness

Statelessness takes different forms, but all share the same condition: the absence of secure political standing.

Dispersed peoples lack a territorial concentration sufficient for sovereignty. Jews before Zionism, and the Roma today, exemplify this structural predicament.

Divided peoples inhabit a historic homeland partitioned among several states. The Kurds are the paradigmatic case: territorially rooted but politically fragmented by borders.

Displaced peoples have been expelled or forced to flee from territories now claimed by others. Palestinians after 1948 and the Rohingya in Myanmar reflect this form of statelessness.

Absorbed peoples remain within state borders but face repression and denial of collective identity. Uyghurs in Xinjiang and Tibetans in China fall into this category.

Each faces different obstacles, but all lack the institutional scaffolding that makes collective agency enforceable.

The Kurdish Case: Variations on Statelessness

The Kurds are not politically monolithic. Their experience across four states shows how statelessness manifests in distinct ways.

Iraqi Kurdistan has achieved the closest approximation to statehood: a regional government, parliament, and the Peshmerga. Yet its autonomy remains conditional. Baghdad contests borders and oil revenues, neighbors oppose independence, and the 2017 referendum—overwhelmingly supported—was crushed through military and economic pressure. Semi-sovereignty exists at others’ sufferance.

Syrian Kurds built an experiment in “democratic confederalism” in Rojava, emphasizing local autonomy and pluralism. But its survival has depended on fragile American protection. When the United States withdrew in 2019, Turkey invaded within days, underscoring how vulnerable non-state alternatives remain.

Turkish Kurds have faced the harshest repression: bans on language and political expression, destroyed cities, outlawed parties, and decades of official denial of Kurdish identity.

Iranian Kurds confront a theocratic state that treats Kurdish nationalism as both an ethnic and political threat, producing periodic uprisings and relentless surveillance.

These differences underscore an important point: stateless peoples often try a range of political arrangements—regional autonomy, federal structures, or forms of self-government short of full independence. These efforts are practical responses to the limits they face. But without international recognition or reliable protection, such arrangements are easily undone.

Again and again, autonomy is offered and then withdrawn, alliances shift, and institutions are disrupted or destroyed. The Kurdish case illustrates what long-term statelessness looks like: continual bargaining with stronger states, limited self-rule, and no secure or lasting political settlement.

Specific Episodes: The Pattern Made Concrete

Abstract analysis requires concrete history. Consider specific moments that reveal the pattern:

Halabja, 1988: Iraqi forces dropped chemical weapons on the Kurdish town, killing 5,000 civilians. The international response was muted. Saddam Hussein faced no serious consequences. The massacre demonstrated that without sovereignty, even genocide could be treated as an internal matter.

The 1991 uprising: After the Gulf War, the U.S. encouraged Kurdish and Shia uprisings against Saddam, then withdrew support. Iraqi forces crushed the revolts. Two million Kurds fled to mountains and borders. The betrayal taught that great power encouragement without commitment is worse than indifference—it invites repression.

The 2017 referendum: Iraqi Kurdistan held an independence vote. Ninety-three percent supported statehood. Baghdad responded with an economic blockade, military pressure, and seizure of disputed territories. International powers—including the United States, which had armed and relied on Kurdish forces against ISIS—condemned the referendum. The message was clear: even when you fight our wars, you remain inconvenient.

October 2019: The United States withdrew from northern Syria after a phone call between Trump and Erdoğan. Within days, Turkish forces invaded Kurdish areas. “They didn’t help us in Normandy,” Trump remarked, as if alliance required historical debt. Syrian Kurds, who had lost 11,000 fighters defeating ISIS on behalf of an international coalition, were abandoned overnight.

These are not random misfortunes. They fit a pattern. Stateless peoples are armed when useful, then abandoned. Celebrated for bravery, then bombed. Their fate oscillates between instrumentalization and neglect. These are the archetypes of the stateless condition.

Zionism and the Exit from Stateless Vulnerability

It is in this context—after minority protections failed, after the Holocaust revealed the ultimate cost of statelessness—that Zionism must be understood. Zionism did not arise simply from romantic nationalism or religious yearning. It emerged from a grim inference: that minority life inside other peoples’ states is always precarious, and that liberal emancipation, however sincere, does not abolish scapegoating, expulsion, or mass murder.

For centuries, European Jews lived as a dispersed people—sometimes tolerated, periodically demonized, always vulnerable to political reversal. Nineteenth-century emancipation promised integration, equality, and citizenship. Many believed the promise. They assimilated, contributed, and saw themselves as Germans or French or Poles of Mosaic faith.

The Holocaust shattered that hope. Civic equality could be revoked overnight; neighbors could become executioners; civilization itself offered no shelter. Six million dead proved that a people without a sovereign refuge remain at the mercy of history’s darkest currents.

Theodor Herzl argued in Der Judenstaat (1896) that Jews had made sustained and sincere efforts to integrate into the nations in which they lived, yet again and again found that full acceptance was denied to them. He was not rejecting universalism so much as reporting its failure.

Zionism became, among other things, a demand to escape the stateless condition—to become a subject rather than an object, to possess agency rather than dependence, to control the means of collective survival. As the historian Anita Shapira argues, it reflected the conclusion that Jewish powerlessness was a fatal historical liability.

Whatever one thinks of Zionism’s consequences—and they are contested, painful, ongoing—its premise was rooted in the modern world’s harsh structure: sovereignty is the precondition of safety. The international community’s failure to protect stateless peoples taught Jews that protection would have to be self-provided.

Palestinians and the Same Historical Lesson

Palestinians, through a different trajectory, have drawn a comparable conclusion.

For decades they have lived in suspension: refugees in camps, citizens nowhere, governed indirectly, dependent on patrons, periodically devastated, endlessly negotiated, never resolved. They exist as an “issue” more than as a polity.

Edward Said described Palestinians as the victims of victims. This was not a denial of Jewish suffering, but an observation about historical displacement—that one people’s escape from statelessness helped propel another into it.

Palestinians, too, have endured cycles of instrumentalization and abandonment. Arab states proclaimed solidarity while restricting Palestinian autonomy, and sometimes turning violence upon them—Black September in Jordan, the camps in Lebanon. International sympathy has often been rhetorical more than material. Peace processes have produced frameworks without closure, partial authority without sovereignty.

The Palestinian demand for statehood, then, is about political standing: recognition, dignity, continuity. Palestinians fear becoming permanently Kurdish—managed, lamented, but never granted resolution. Their demand arises from the same logic that once drove Zionism: that statelessness is vulnerability, dependence is danger, and without sovereignty a people has no secure future.

Mahmoud Darwish gave this longing its most haunting expression when he wrote of Palestinians as having “a country of words,” sustained by speech while the journey toward home remains unfinished. The desire is not only for territory, but for closure—for the stability and continuity that sovereignty promises.

Two Peoples, One Brutal Insight: The Mirrored Logic of Survival

Here the modern tragedy sharpens to its most painful point.

Jews and Palestinians are not opposites in the logic of their historical claims. They are mirrors. Both have learned the same brutal lesson of the twentieth century: Statelessness is vulnerability. Dependence is dangerous. Rights without power are fragile. Recognition without sovereignty is incomplete. International sympathy will not prevent a catastrophe.

Only sovereign agency promises survival.

This is why the conflict cannot be reduced to a simple morality play of perpetrators and victims. Movements that ignore this structural symmetry misunderstand the political logic both peoples inhabit.

The world urges coexistence, pluralism, rights beyond borders, and international guarantees. These are noble ideals. But stateless peoples—Jews historically, Palestinians today—have learned that ideals without enforcement mechanisms dissolve in crisis. The international system itself teaches nationalism. It creates the very problem it claims to lament.

The collision is unbearable because both demands to escape statelessness attach to the same land. Both peoples fear that compromise means returning to vulnerability. Both have historical reasons for that fear. Both are acting rationally within the structure the modern world has built.

Isaiah Berlin understood such moments as the clash of legitimate values that cannot be fully reconciled—the tragedy of moral conflict. There is no clean position outside this tragedy, only the recognition that the international order does not protect the stateless, and that both peoples have drawn from this the same conclusion: sovereignty is essential to survival.

Is There a Solution?

If peoples believe that sovereignty is necessary for survival—what solutions actually remain? Partition? Federation? One state?

The historical record is not encouraging. Nearly every proposed solution has been tried elsewhere, and each runs into the same hard reality: the modern world is built around nation-states, and it has very few stable ways of handling two national movements in the same territory.

Partition

Partition is the most common response when two peoples claim the same land. It was the basis of the 1947 UN plan, and it remains the default “two-state solution.”

But history shows that partition is rarely clean or peaceful. It usually comes with trauma and displacement.

The classic example is India and Pakistan in 1947: partition created two states, but it also produced one of the largest refugee crises in modern history and left behind unresolved wounds that still shape politics today.

A similar story unfolded in Cyprus, divided after violence in 1974 into Greek and Turkish zones that remain separated decades later.

Partition can stop certain forms of conflict, but it often creates new ones: contested borders, minority populations stranded on the “wrong” side, and permanent claims of injustice.

In Israel–Palestine, the obstacles are even greater now than in 1947. Settlements, territorial fragmentation, and security fears have made separation harder. Still, partition persists because it is one of the only solutions that gives both peoples what they most demand: a state of their own.

Federation or Confederation

A federation or confederation tries to avoid dividing the land by creating shared structures: one territory, two peoples, some form of autonomy for each.

In theory, this can sound morally better than partition.

But history suggests that federations work only under conditions of trust and strong guarantees—and those are precisely what long conflicts destroy.

Multiethnic states often break apart when national groups fear domination. Yugoslavia is the clearest example: it was held together for decades, but collapsed violently in the 1990s into ethnic war and partition.

Lebanon shows another danger: power-sharing arrangements can freeze divisions rather than overcome them, leaving politics permanently unstable.

For Palestinians, autonomy without full sovereignty can feel like permanent subordination. For Israelis, shared sovereignty can feel like the erosion of the one state meant to guarantee Jewish security. The historical problem is simple: federations require mutual confidence, and stateless peoples are shaped by the opposite experience—promises revoked, protections ignored.

A Single Democratic State

The one-state solution argues that since separation may no longer be feasible, the answer is one democratic polity with equal rights.

But here the historical record again raises fears.

Modern democracies can function in deeply plural societies, but when two national groups see politics as existential, one-state arrangements often become unstable. Bosnia today remains formally unified, but it operates as a fragile and heavily supervised international compromise, not as a confident shared nation.

And the central issue is unavoidable: in a single state, one people eventually becomes a minority.

Jews fear returning to minority vulnerability—the very condition Zionism sought to escape. Palestinians fear that without sovereign power, “one state” would simply institutionalize inequality under a different name.

The Deeper Impasse

So this analysis does not produce an easy answer. Instead, it helps explain why the conflict has proven so resistant.

Both Jews and Palestinians have drawn the same lesson from modern history: statelessness is dangerous, and sovereignty feels necessary.

That is why the struggle is so intense. It is not only about borders or resources. It is about the belief that without a state, a people can be ignored, dominated, or expelled—as the Kurds have often been, as Jews once were, as Palestinians fear they may be.

Beyond the Nation-State?

In the long run, perhaps the real problem is that the nation-state system offers so few ways for two peoples to share one land safely. The world has very limited experience with political arrangements that provide security and dignity without exclusive sovereignty.

But stateless peoples rarely have the luxury of waiting for new political forms to be invented.

For now, the modern system continues to teach the harsh lesson that sovereignty is the only reliable protection—and that lesson keeps the conflict locked in place.

The Kurdish Reminder

The Kurds remain the clearest unresolved case of modern statelessness. Their history shows what happens when statehood never arrives—when autonomy is granted and then withdrawn, when recognition is repeatedly deferred.

Across the 20th and 21st centuries, the same pattern has recurred. Kurdish movements face repression in one country, conditional autonomy in another, and shifting alliances everywhere. Kurds have been valued as partners against common enemies—Saddam Hussein, ISIS, Assad—only to be abandoned when geopolitical priorities change. Despite numbering more than thirty million people with a distinct language and historical homeland, Kurdish aspirations receive sustained international attention only during moments of crisis.

The Kurdish case shows how the international system treats stateless peoples: it manages them, sometimes sympathizes with them, occasionally arms them, but rarely grants them durable political standing. The old Kurdish proverb captures the experience bluntly: “The Kurds have no friends but the mountains.”

Beyond the Middle East

This logic is not confined to the Kurdish case. Statelessness and political limbo appear in other forms across the world.

Climate change is likely to create new displaced populations without clear political membership, as entire regions become uninhabitable. Failed states such as Somalia, Libya, or Yemen show what happens when sovereignty collapses but no alternative political order can gain recognition. Separatist movements—from Catalonia to Xinjiang—raise the same underlying question: what happens when a people believes the existing state does not represent them, yet the international community insists borders must remain fixed?

Indigenous peoples, too, often occupy a form of structural statelessness: culturally distinct, historically rooted, but lacking recognized sovereignty within the nation-state system.

The Recognition Problem

All of this raises a basic question: does the international order recognize peoples, or only states?

In practice, it recognizes states. There are few credible mechanisms for stateless groups to claim political standing without already possessing sovereignty. Borders are treated as nearly inviolable. Autonomy arrangements are fragile without enforcement. And alternatives between full independence and permanent minority status remain rare and unstable.

Until these structures change, stateless peoples will continue to conclude that only sovereignty provides lasting security.

Limits and Risks

Does this concede too much to nationalism? Perhaps. But the issue is not whether nationalism is morally ideal; it is whether the international system makes it rational. Cosmopolitan ideals—human rights, post-national belonging, international guarantees—remain aspirational. Stateless peoples have repeatedly learned that such protections fail in moments of crisis.

Does this analysis justify violence? Not necessarily. But it helps explain why desperation can lead to armed struggle, without endorsing atrocities or denying moral limits. The uncomfortable truth is that many existing states were formed through conflict, and the international order often recognizes sovereignty only after it has been imposed.

The Core Tragedy

The deepest problem is that dignity has been made contingent on sovereignty.

We speak of universal rights, yet enforce them unevenly. We affirm self-determination, yet resist the political changes it requires. We lament the suffering of stateless peoples, yet offer them sympathy without standing.

Jews sought escape from this condition after the catastrophes of European history. Palestinians seek escape from it amid occupation and political suspension. Kurds remain caught in it still.

Until the international order finds ways to recognize peoples not only as victims deserving aid but as political subjects deserving durable membership, statelessness will remain one of the central unresolved conditions of modern life.

The question for the 21st century is whether we can build political forms that provide security and recognition without requiring permanent subordination—or whether the world will continue to teach the harshest lesson of all: that without a state, a people will always remain vulnerable.