Fully Human

Abstract

Abstract Fully Human: Personhood, Citizenship, and Rights critically considers how inequalities related to citizenship and recognition impact one’s ability to claim so-called universal and inalienable rights. Today, citizenship itself serves to recognize an individual as fully human or worthy of fundamental human rights—yet this robust form of political membership is limited or missing entirely for some vulnerable groups. These protection gaps are central to hierarchies of personhood—inequalities that render some people more “worthy” than others for protections and political membership—that lead to gross violations of the rights to place and purpose that are essential for a person to live a life of human dignity. This book presents various manifestations of hierarchies of personhood, beginning with statelessness (the most direct and obvious lack of functioning citizenship) and progressing through the forcibly displaced, irregular migrants, nomadic peoples, Indigenous nations, and “second-class” citizens in the United States. It challenges the binary construct between citizen and noncitizen, arguing that rights to place and purpose are routinely violated in the space between. To resist hierarchies of personhood, functioning citizenship necessitates the opening of political space for those who cannot be neatly categorized. Only by recognizing that all people are inherently worthy of full personhood—and by advocating expanded forms of political membership and voice—can the ideals of modern human rights be realized.

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