Statelessness as a Metaphysical and Moral Crisis: Drawing on Fichte’s philosophy of recognition and Arendt’s “right to have rights,” the Rohingya’s denial of citizenship under Myanmar’s 1982 law represents not only a humanitarian tragedy but a fundamental negation of moral agency and juridical personhood — rendering them legally invisible and outside the conditions for selfhood.

The State’s Failure Undermines Right Itself: Fichte views the state as the institutional embodiment of reciprocal recognition and freedom. By stripping the Rohingya of legal status, Myanmar forfeits its moral legitimacy, becoming a “system of compulsion without right” and exposing a deeper crisis in the modern nation-state system.

Recognition as a Transcendental Demand: Affirming the Rohingya’s rights is not optional charity but a necessary requirement of reason and the moral world-order. Both Fichte and Arendt demand universal recognition as the foundation of freedom, calling for political structures that transcend national exclusion to realize true cosmopolitan justice.

In a world that proclaims human rights as universal, what does it mean that entire peoples are rendered legally nonexistent—human beings for whom, as Hannah Arendt put it, “no law exists”? This essay turns to Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s philosophy of recognition to argue that the Rohingya are not only victims of a humanitarian disaster, but the site of a deeper metaphysical crisis: a systematic refusal of juridical personhood that exposes statelessness as a negation of the very conditions of moral agency. By reading Fichte alongside Arendt’s “right to have rights,” the article reveals how Myanmar’s 1982 Citizenship Law transforms the Rohingya into the limit case of the modern moral world order and contends that recognising their rights is not mere charity but a transcendental demand of reason itself.

I. Introduction: The Moral and Philosophical Scandal of Statelessness

Few conditions so starkly expose the limits of our moral and political order as those of the stateless person. For Hannah Arendt, the refugee or stateless individual—deprived of citizenship and stripped of political belonging—reveals “the right to have rights” as the first and most fundamental of all rights.1 The case of the Rohingya, denied citizenship under Myanmar’s 1982 Nationality Law and persecuted as an “alien” presence within their own homeland, exemplifies the deepest contradiction of modern politics: the existence of persons whom the law has rendered invisible.

To address this contradiction philosophically, we may turn to Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose conception of right (Recht) as the condition of reciprocal recognition among free beings provides a powerful framework for understanding the moral catastrophe of statelessness. Though writing in the late eighteenth century, Fichte’s Foundations of Natural Right anticipates the central insight of Arendt’s political thought: that human dignity depends not merely on biological existence, but on the political and juridical recognition of one’s personhood.2

Through Fichte, we can understand statelessness not only as a humanitarian tragedy but as a transcendental violation—a negation of the very conditions that make moral agency possible. This essay develops that argument in three movements: first, Fichte’s conception of recognition and right; second, the function of the state as the realization of moral freedom; and third, the resonance of these ideas with Arendt’s account of the refugee as the paradigmatic figure of modern disenfranchisement.

II. Recognition and the Conditions of Selfhood

In the Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte establishes recognition (Anerkennung) as the ground of both self-consciousness and right. The I,........

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