| Sumario: | Sixty years after the 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees attempted to negotiate the problematic political relationship between states and refugees highlighted by Hannah Arendt, shifting geopolitical, legal, and sovereign geographies have exacerbated the unevenness of refugees' ability to claim the right to seek asylum. In this article, we employ a framework of embodied epistemologies to extend Arendt's insights into the role of the stateless for sovereign logics. We argue that the 'right to have rights' as an embodied possibility is not only integral to the logics of sovereignty, but also to the creation of new political spaces. Our article draws on collaborative case studies in Guam/ Northern Marianas Islands, Lampedusa, and Christmas Island. We argue that while Arendt paid singular attention to the terrain of the sovereign, there exists a far more complex geography of the state that must be negotiated to claim rights. The 'right to have rights' is necessarily an embodied possibility and practice that creates new political spaces on the grounds of and across sovereign spaces and nation-state territories.
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