Arendt Studies

published on August 25, 2022

The Right to Have Rights in the Americas
Arendt, Monture, and the Problem of the State

This article examines how Hannah Arendt’s idea of a “right to have rights” could travel in the Americas. It offers a reading of the right to have rights that foregrounds the right to land as a basic right. This reading emerges through an attention to contemporary Indigenous social movements and political philosophy. Taken together, this examination and reading ask justice-oriented actors to support land back movements as part of a broader practice of defending human rights and situating those rights within a responsibility to land.