Seyla Benhabib
What happens when liberal democracies stop seeing dignity as a universal right and begin treating it as something reserved for insiders?
On this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer sits down with political philosopher Seyla Benhabib to explore the moral, political, and philosophical stakes of migration, borders, and belonging in America today. Against the backdrop of rising cruelty toward immigrants, asylum seekers, and other vulnerable people, they examine what happens when states retreat from their highest ideals and redraw the boundaries of who counts. Together, they discuss the fragility of human rights, the difference between borders and belonging, and why Jews—shaped by memories of statelessness, displacement, and exclusion—must take these questions seriously.
This special live episode of Identity/Crisis was recorded as part of In the Face of Cruelty: Jewish Responsibilities to Neighbors and Strangers, a virtual day of learning on March 12, 2026.
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Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.
Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Thursday, March 12th, 2026 as part of a full day of learning, In the Face of Cruelty: Jewish Responsibilities to Neighbors and Strangers, a program we’ve created in response to a crisis of cruelty that we perceive taking place in America around the administration’s crackdown on immigration.
We’re happy to have over a thousand people registered for this day of learning and to incorporate this podcast as part of that experience. Thank you to those who are here live in person, and thank you, of course, to the many of you who will be listening to this in the Identity/Crisis feed.
In my years of studying and teaching about Jewish organizational life over the past decade, I’ve often described a phenomenon that I see all the time as “the tragedy of institutions.” We, human beings, we form organizations to respond to essential human needs and concerns in those moments that we need them. We have needs for community, for spirituality, and for education. But immediately after every institution or organization is created, its mission inevitably changes, and it becomes trying to preserve the institution itself.
Healthy organizations, the ones that can thrive and survive, ultimately succeed at ensuring that they’re always focused on those very needs for which they were created. The unhealthy ones fixate on their own survival, whether or not they’re still serving their original mission. Lately, I’ve begun to consider an analogy to this, in the current crisis faced by so many Western liberal states, liberal states were founded to ensure the freedoms of the peoples that founded them, but often for a bigger idea than that in the belief in the fundamental idea of human freedom, which needed some sort of political framework to guarantee liberties and rights.
So maybe they too, Liberal Western states, are inevitably subject to the same instant transformation that happens to all of our organizations and institutions. They shift from the power of that original idea as something meant for everyone, liberty, for everyone, to the mere protection of those who are already inside. You start believing in liberty as a universal good for which your own state is just a particular case. Inevitably, the state will come to divide between liberty for some and not for others, and its borders wind up doing a lot of that work.
This is a particular challenge for the United States of America. See, most other nation states are built for or around a particular people, an ethnos, although we’ll call that into question a little later today. So it’s more logical that those states are premised on preserving the liberty and protecting the human lives of those particular peoples for whom they created a nation state. It makes more sense that such states would be highly protective of the boundaries, literal and figurative of their own peoples.
But the United States was a global experiment in a different kind of approach to liberty altogether. The United States was meant to be a place for a kind of liberty from a dominant ethnos that was built into its creation.
Now, we know that the United States always talked a bigger game about liberty than it actually created for people. Of course, Native Americans, Black Americans, can testify to this, as can so many immigrant groups that had to go through crucibles of seeking to belong to and benefit from America’s freedoms before they were begrudgingly accepted as part of the cultural fabric.
Still, there is this American ideal, which was narrated and reinforced for centuries that America was supposed to be a kind of post ethnic experiment in liberalism, an attempt to actualize the idea that all men are created equal with inalienable rights. Thus, there’s this tragedy that we see increasingly around us in this era of mass global migration.
We’re watching this country shifting very visibly towards drawing much sharper distinctions between insiders and outsiders as to who gets the privileges of liberty and equality. But more troubling than that, because you don’t have to believe entirely in open borders to be a good liberal, we’re seeing that our societies are devolving into actual dehumanization of the other, the ultimate betrayal of what’s supposed to be our core moral and political commitment.
So put differently, it’s plausible to argue that America can promote a different kind of liberty for citizens and non-citizens, but it’s implausible to argue that America can be true to itself by denying the basics of human dignity to anyone in its midst, whether or not they are a citizen.
There are a lot of historical reasons why American Jews should care about this issue right now in our precarious America. There are, of course, moral reasons why our tradition demands of us that we pay special attention to the vulnerable. We know those texts, we cite them all the time, commonly induce more teachings about the widow, the stranger, and the orphan in the Torah, than on any other particular issue.
There are political reasons why I think American Jews should be concerned about a country that becomes more xenophobic. You could start with attitudes that are hostile towards outsiders, and then you gradually move to a place where some insiders become classified as outsiders.
There are even Zionist reasons I think why we, Jews should generally be on the side of self-determination for all peoples, and I’m proud that our organization is entertaining all of these ideas and more today, as part of this day of learning. The Shalom Hartman Institute is ultimately an institution of ideas and education. We are not an advocacy organization, but we are thrilled when advocacy organizations use the content and ideas of the Hartman Institute to do what they do in the world. Our lane is to do things like this, providing deep, textured content to leaders to help shape a better future for Jewish life, in Israel and America and around the world.
I’m especially pleased and honored to be in conversation today on this topic with Professor Seyla Benhabib. Professor Benhabib is a American political philosopher. She has held very, very senior roles at Yale University and now at Columbia University, between philosophy and the law schools in contemporary critical thought. She was director of the program in Ethics, Politics and Economics at Yale for a number of years. She’s very well known for her work in political philosophy, especially on the philosophers, Hannah Arendt and Jürgen Habermas, as well as especially on this topic of human migration and its significance. She’s the author of many books, has received several prestigious awards and lectureship from recognition of her work.
There are really few people in the world who have spent more time thinking about the issues of migration, immigration, and rights than Professor Benhabib. I felt it was critical that we spend this day going as deep as we can into these big questions.
So, Seyla, thank you so much for being on the show today.
Seyla: Thank you for the invitation and for your helpful introductory, introductory comments. I mean, I like very much the, the general topic of what we can do in the face of this prevalent cruelty. And I particularly think that the choice of the word cruelty is interesting here,because we are confronting a situation within the United States with respect to undocumented migrants, but migrants, and also permanent residents, something that is going beyond the inspection of the rights or the limitation of the rights of migrant and stranger, is that there is an unusual attack on the texture of everyday life. The way in which people are being removed from communities. I mean, we’ve all seen the picture of that 5-year-old child being taken from his school and being shipped off to some kind refugee camp in Texas that affects us and revolts us.
And I think particularly as Jews, it cuts into very deep, it should cut into very deep memories and moral sentiments. It’s impossible for us not to be affected by that because of our own history. But let us, let us look at the paradoxes of the liberal state, if you wish, first at a more philosophical level, and then we can come to speak if you wish about the specificities of what we’re going through in the United States.
As you pointed out, liberal democratic states are founded on the principles of freedom and equality, but equality for whom? The way I put this in my work is that the boundaries of the demos, the boundaries of those who constitute the people. “We, the people.” Who are the people? The boundaries of the people always remain somewhat contentious.
And as we know, in the case of the American experience, this doesn’t even bear repeating, the “we the people” of the declaration did not apply to Black chattel slaves or three fifth persons. It did not apply, until 1920, to women, who had no legal personhood and American natives were considered dependent sovereignties. They were not American citizens until later.
So I think we have to understand liberal equality, the project of states founded on the principles of liberal equality as also an ongoing contention and ongoing contentious dialogue. Something that sometimes I describe as “democratic iterations.” Iteration because we are appealing to some foundational principles that constitute, that constitute the people as such.
I mean, I know that Israel, for example, there was never a signed constitution because of the disagreements, et cetera, and Ben Gurion said, let’s leave that. But there is a foundational law. There is a fundamental law.
Yehuda: Basic laws. Yeah.
Seyla: Yeah. Every nation, every community has some principle founding principle to it, to which it appeals. But this founding principle needs reinterpretation and reactivation every generation or through conflicts. We need to make it our own.
And the American experience is actually a very contentious one. I mean, there was the ’82 Chinese Exclusion Act. And Chinese persons who are not considered citizens. There is the internment of Japanese Americans. Korematsu, one of the shameful decisions of the US Supreme Court.
So once we understand this issue of the boundaries of the demos, of a kind of, let’s put it this way, a side of contention and negotiation and renegotiation of who we are.
Yehuda: I’m gonna interrupt you and ask you ask us to start with what feels different, because you’re right to cite that there are unquestionably constant, chronic episodes throughout American history of this kind of this kind of move back and forth around America’s hospitality towards, and hostility towards both immigrants as well as people who are already here.
But you wrote something at the outset of, of your book, The Rights of Others, a very beautiful phrase where you say, “We are like travelers navigating an unknown terrain with the help of old maps, drawn at a different time and in response to different needs. While the terrain we’re traveling on, the world society of states has changed, our normative map has not.”
In other words, something has changed in the nature of migration, global migration and immigration that is creating a particular type of instability that’s emerged, I think in the last, let’s say 25 years. Can you talk a little bit about what you think that change is? What has prompted this kind of renegotiation of the question of migration and immigration and has kind of elevated the amount of, I would say hostility and cruelty in particular, around this particular issue.
The old maps that we hold, which purport, as you said, to indicate like boundaries around particular groups, no longer seem to apply anymore given the fact of migration. Can you, can you help us unpack that a little bit? What, what in particular you think has changed?
Seyla: Yes. Let me begin with a more general answer to that and then try to come to what I think may be happening in the United States. When you look at the facts and figures of migration, and this seems to be an area where there is a lot of mythology and not a lot of concrete thinking, it’s only actually three and a half percent or so of the world’s 7 billion people who are migrants. That is, who cross international borders, from one country to another, whether to work for leisure as asylum seekers, refugees, what have you. So it’s about, roughly the last figures are about 280 million or so.
But what’s happening is that the rate of migration is accelerating, in the sense that the rate of migration is increasing faster than the rate of the world’s population. And so I think this is creating a sense of crisis at the borders. This is creating, in the first place, a crisis for the state.
So to pick up on a theme from your previous panel, a crisis of identity. can be identity crisis and administrative crisis. So in the first place, there is the administrative crisis. Mostly experienced, let’s say by European states with Mediterranean boats at the border, not knowing what to do with them, et cetera. So that is a, that is a universal, I think that, let’s put it this way, general phenomena for the North Atlantic European countries, I don’t really have the numbers for, you know, for the rest of the world. But I think the phenomenon is pretty typical.
Now, when we come, when we keep this in mind, what’s happening in the United States is not actually, if you look at the numbers, it’s not an extraordinary situation. I mean, there was a time when, as a result of the COVID crisis, when the borders were closed and, and when under the Biden administration, the borders were to some extent reopened. There was a kind of surge at the southern border. But again, it’s, it’s not the numbers. Although the Biden era, you know, the, the first two or three years, it is partially the fact that the United States is withdrawing from its commitments, also to the refugee convention and asylum.
So this is an important distinction to make because migration, migrants are not all refugees and asylum seekers, migrants come to countries for the purposes of a family unification, labor, becoming… religious belonging, becoming integrated to, to civil society, what have you.
But what has happened in the United States is a blurring and a confusion in the public mind about what’s going on at the southern border as the paradigmatic case of what’s happening with migration, right?
And, so yes, at the southern border, you have people not only from Mexico, but from Haiti, from Africa, even China trying to gain access to the United States in the asylum process. And I’m afraid that this is also something that had already started under the Obama administration. There has been, yeah, a stepping back from commitments. Not at all levels. For example, president Obama defended DACA, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals. Right. But 400,000 people were already deported under the Obama administration as well.
Yehuda: Right. The Obama administration set records on deportations. They’ve been blown outta the water by the past year of the Trump administration, but they were actually deporting people at, at really unprecedented rates.
Seyla: Yes. Yes, yes. And that had something to do with the after effect of 9/11. The feeling that we had admitted immigrant groups into this country, what became known as the Muslim ban, that we had admitted immigrant groups into this country that were our enemies, basically. And so this sort of led to a set of deportations.
But what’s happening now, I ask. What is going on? I would say three things and please interrupt me if I—
Yehuda: I will, yeah.
Seyla: The first is that our commitments to our international obligations are weakening, if not obliterated. I mean the refugee convention is still good law in the United States until it is repudiated by the US Congress and it hasn’t been. It is still good law.
But the institutions are not functioning well. They’re at a very nitty level, there aren’t enough immigration and asylum judges. Instead, what we are having is the ad hoc creation of, of groups like US ICE Immigration. A lot of us people are not trained properly in asylum law. I know some will heavily contest us, but they’re, they’re not. And so that’s the second situation, that administratively the system is sort of broken.
And the third, and maybe this is the most disturbing, and it comes back to the question of cruelty in this generalized sense of malaise and crisis that American society has about itself, it’s very easy to pick on the other as the cause, okay? Because the other, the stranger, is visible and at the same time, no one quite knows the other. And a stranger can become a site of projection of all sorts of fears and anxieties.
I mean, I’m perfectly ready to accept the fact that as a result of the industrialization and globalization, there has been great suffering among certain portions of the American old industrial working class and they have lost their status and their jobs. And we must be sensitive to that and try to do something about it.
But it takes really a stretch to believe that the Somali refugee in Minnesota that is being chased out by ICE is going to be the person, you know, whose departure is going to help American lives.
Yehuda: Right, was the cause of that problem.
And, and in fact, actually, like, you know, The Cato Institute, by no means a liberal institution, has been actually very public in pushing this message, even over the past week, that says that the net increase that migrants have provided to the US economy is in the trillions of dollars over the last few decades.
So the, what you’re pointing to, I think is a really important piece, which is there are genuine reasons why Americans feel that the American dream is less accessible to them, that there’s something failed and broken in the society which is manifested in their own economic and political struggles, but to locate that towards a sector of the population that is actually doing good things for the US economy, it doesn’t reflect a genuine reality. Those are not the people who are causing your problems, but they become a kind of easy target for people to identify as the, kind of, scapegoat in this story.
If I can, I wanna, I wanna pull apart a couple of things that you said, Seyla, ’cause I think there’s a lot here. I think that what you’re pointing to is that it’s that, that, especially under Trump, but it, it was different under Obama, but reflected something similar. There is a little bit of a renegotiation of the kind of international order in which we see ourselves as collectively responsible, kind of, for the global good.
The interesting thing about the Trump administration is that they’re not, especially over the last four months, it’s not the fully isolationist agenda. The Trump administration is trying to pursue a very powerful renegotiation of the world order, but it only wants the power side. It doesn’t seem to want the kind of responsibility side, right?
In Venezuela and now in Iran, it is pursuing an aggressive foreign policy strategy to put America back as kind of the global leader. But what was so interesting about the previous period in American history was it did so while also kind of taking responsibility for the global institutions and advancing the kind of community of nations where it played a prominent role. That seems like a pretty big change.
And the other thing that I think you alluded to, but I want to go into deeper, is the post-9/11 shift. I mean, I couldn’t help but notice, your book comes out in 2003, 2004. And I remember Aharon Barak, the former Chief Justice of the Israeli Supreme Court, wrote a really important piece, came out in the Yale Law Review, right after 9/11 about how the War on terror is forcing a renegotiation of questions of liberty, both for citizens, but also especially for non-citizens.
So that feels to me like a big piece of this story, the perception that whatever our responsibility is as human beings towards migrants and immigrants, however much they contribute to our global economy, there’s just an immense amount of fear of the destabilization that is brought by terror, which is usually understood by Americans as something that’s imported for the from the Middle East.
Can you talk a little bit about how that fear of the outsider, which in some cases is warranted, right, plays into this discussion of our responsibility towards others and outsiders?
Seyla: Right, right, right. A great, great question to think about together. Yes. I mean, despite continuities, one, between Democratic and Republican administrations in certain respects, one should emphasize what you began by saying, that in fact, for the Obama administration as well as the Biden administration, global responsibilities were very important contact and certain respect for international law. The law is always open to interpretation, for sure
But what has happened under the Trump administration, but also to some extent, you know, in Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, okay, one of the central principles of international law about the acquisition of territory through war. And we know this has implications for Israel-Palestine as well, that it was one of the principles of international law in the post World War II period that forbade the acquisition of territory through war and conquest. This principle is now negated not only by the Trump administration, but also Mr. Putin’s actions had, you know, it also got the ball rolling, in some sense.
So we are at a very dangerous point when, I say, sovereignty is being understood as impunity. Sovereignty, no longer as an institution, a prerogative, also respected by others, by neighboring states and guaranteed by international law, but somehow impunity to do whatever the strongest can and what the weak must suffer.
In that sense, we are at a very dangerous point. And also the fact that the Trump administration withdrew, you know, from 50 plus international institutions. I mean, the thing that kills me is why do we have to withdraw from the World Health Organization? I mean, what kind of logic goes into that? What kind of counter-enlightenment, reactionary logic is this? Okay, so that’s, that’s one issue.
Now, the War on Terror undoubtedly has morphed into a generalizable excuse for the curtailment of civil liberties. And, in fact, we are at a point now when Congress voted against even you, revoking the War Powers Act. I mean, Congress basically said, oh, well, you know, we don’t, we don’t need that. You know, we are somehow, whatever it is that we are doing in Iran, or whatever it is that we did in Venezuela, going for a stroll.
So everything just put together, it’s, it’s, it’s a moment when rules are being broken. International law is violated, norms are being destroyed, and nothing new seems to be emerging in its place. I mean, I still think that the, Prime Minister Carney was really prophetic when he said, he said it’s a rupture. But we don’t know where this will go.
Yehuda: Right. So it’s inevitable, then, that countries will then say, listen, if there’s a, if there’s a rupture, whether or not we’re causing it, then our responsibility is to kind of shut down to outsiders. It’s almost a natural kind of visceral response to say we have to then operate with a kind of hermeneutic of suspicion when it comes to people who wanna come through our borders, right? That’s gonna be the natural kind consequence on the other end of this.
And I guess, you know, this is something that you alluded to before, but I, but I think about a lot and, and I’ve been pushed on it, which is, I think even those of us who wanna see a more, let’s say, liberal or open… certainly humane immigration policy, there is a kind of understood dichotomy between, or even hierarchy between like, well, if somebody’s coming as a refugee or asylum seeker, like that’s, everybody agrees that that’s fundamentally good. Right? Although the Trump administration is rescinding those, the temporary protective status for Haitians and for other people for whom returning home is gonna be a death sentence.
But there is more hesitation that kicks in when it’s like, no, that person is not a refugee or asylum seeker, but they’re, quote unquote, merely coming for economic opportunity, the pursuit of a new life. Can you, can you talk about the moral calculus of those two? Do you feel it’s a legitimate distinction that we should be making? Or should we be taking the approach of just., you know, the world order is changing and people are complicated. And, you know, what’s, what’s your read on that kind of moral hierarchy between the refugee or the asylum seeker and the person in pursuit of economic opportunity?
Seyla: Yeah. I mean that, that is one of the sort of normative distinctions that underlie the ’51 Refugee Convention.
And I’ll say something a bit counterintuitive here. I think actually the United States likes migrants and it dislikes refugees. In Europe, the sense is, okay, we have an obligation to refugees because we know what happened. We know what we did, and you know, we have, we accept the moral obligation. But the Europeans are completely paranoid about labor migration, and they control it very, very strictly.
Where there is something in the United States where labor migration is actually seen to be almost part of the human condition. That’s why Wall Street Journal, you know, pleads for open borders. I mean, you know, that’s why, you know, institutions, certain institutions, you know, accept the contribution of the migrant.
But what is underlining the distinction is that the refugee is someone from whom his or her country of usual residence or state has withdrawn protection. In other words, the refugee is not someone who has lost a job. But if I may use Hannah Arendt’s terminology, the refugee is someone who has almost lost the right to have rights. Because their state has withdrawn the protection from them.
How can this happen? This can happen through denaturalization, as was the case with the German Jews. You lose your citizenship. It can happen as with the Rohingya in Myanmar when the state says, you are Muslim, go over to the border, to Bangladesh, and you are citizens there. But here in Myanmar, you’re not citizens. You are just displaced persons.
Or it can happen, it can happen politically. You become an unwanted person. The state no longer wants to protect you or feels obliged to protect you. There are many, many ways in which the refugee condition is created, and it is in a world that is still divided into territorial nation states.
The refugee condition is really a condition of rightlessness. Unless another political entity gives you a refuge and says, you can, at least your life, minimally, your life and your freedoms are safe, right? Stay on our territory. Then the refugee, you know, they, they have no other recourse. That’s why in legal language, one uses a French term, non-refoulement, which means you can’t render someone back.
And again, you know, there are so many resonances of this, you know, in Jewish history, that we can go into, boats that were turned back from Cuba, or a case that I’m very familiar with, the Struma, that was turned back, you know, in the shores of the Bosporus and, you know, try to… So the refugee, you know, convention says we have an obligation of non-refoulement. We should first. We should first test the credibility of the claim, right?
And so that’s the point at which all the difficulties about administration, legal obligations, political obligations, begin, you know, that in fact, in the United States, things have gotten to such a strange point that the refugee has to enter upon a designated port of entry.
Now, the refugee is not a tourist, you know? They’re not coming into JFK, I mean, they’re trying, they have to come into a designated port of entry into the southern border in order to be able to get an interview number, a reasonable fear interview number from US asylum authorities. So the whole system has really gotten jumbled up, you know?
Yehuda: Yeah, and it is deeply reminiscent from the standpoint of Jewish kind of historical and cultural memory of the impossible maze of when you, when you lose your rights, the maze of how you actually find your way out or survive in a society. We just know this story too well as the Jewish people. You wrote in your book, not having papers. You’re talking about America. You talk about, you say not having papers is civil death. You have, you have no way of, not just of maintaining your status, which is what we’re talking about, but also being able to participate in any sort of democratic way, in the country.
And that just feels like so evocative of the Jewish experience. Well, if a new administrative state emerges in Nazi Germany and just says, suddenly these papers that you’ve held are no longer valid, well then you are just, you have no standing and status.
And I found it very provocative what you said, Seyla, which is that paradoxically America seems to actually value the economic pursuit more than it does the refugee. And it kind of makes sense for a capitalist society. If you can demonstrate you have worth and that what you contribute to the society is more than you take, then it’s a purely economic calculus. But the responsibility to take care of the refugee, the asylum seeker, is to just provide for them without a guarantee of return. And I hate to speak in such economic transactionalism, but it seems to kind of underlie what you’re, what you’re describing.
And I’ll also say like, first time I read Arendt’s line on, on “the rights to have rights,” it was kind of a life changing experience, because the thing that she exposes, and I’d love for you to unpack this a little bit more for us, the thing that I think she exposes, which feels very deep, is that we talk so much about human rights, but actually human rights don’t really matter.
I don’t mean that they don’t matter ideologically, like of course we should walk through the world thinking that all human beings are invested with a kind of absolute worth. Whether you make that claim based on a theological claim, all humans beings are created image of God, or whether you make it just as a kind of fact of pluralism, like all human beings make claims on us.
But talking the language of human rights doesn’t really matter to people because that’s fine, but are you actually willing to grant me civil rights? Are you actually willing to give me papers? Are you willing to actually give me some tools or mechanisms to be able to function, to belong, to operate, to have voice?
So I think that that feels actually counter-cultural to a lot of us, to say human rights are an interesting abstract, but they’re not, they don’t actually really matter to people and maybe they’re a little bit of a distraction.
Seyla: I think one of Arendt’s fundamental insights, and it’s interesting to hear you say that when you read that, that it was a life changing experience. I mean, you know, I think it’s a fundamental insight where she said that the right to have rights is fundamentally to be a member of a human community that respects not only your moral worth, but also that in some sense sees you as an equal for whom you have to stand up.
And there are two things that are linked there. The, in the liberal tradition, Hobbes, Locke Rousseau, even Kant, rights are understood in very individualistic terms as what adhere to human beings, as if they were, you know, hair color or skin color or something. But no, rights are basically embedded in human practices. They’re forms of practices. To have a right is to make a claim upon someone else and to have someone else make a claim on me. So rights and duties, rights and obligations cannot be separated from one another.
And in her own way, I think Arendt saw that the right to have rights is an understanding of that social context within which the language of rights makes sense at all in the first place. Right. And this gets us back to where we started. How do we constitute that community and what are the boundaries of that community? What are the boundaries of the demos that recognizes my right to have rights? How am I constituted—and this is what she means by equality, she doesn’t mean socioeconomic equality, but equality in the eyes of the law, equality of my right to have rights, whatever then the content of those rights are.
But first I need to be recognized. I need to be recognized as somehow a member. I need to be recognized as someone towards whom you have and you feel special obligations and the community feels obligations. And for Arendt, who as you know, was stateless for a period of 18 years or so. From 1933 to 1950, 51. For her, it seemed that to be stakeless, she says in one passage, is almost worse than being a prisoner because a prisoner has a structure. You know, the guilty one has a structural society within which he or she’s recognized. And sometimes she says statelessness is worse than slavery, though I don’t think that that’s quite a good analogy, because you might say that the slave also has no right to have rights.
This, I think, resonates, resonates in our, continues to resonate in our, in our world in terms of, again, those whom we recognize as those to whom we have the obligation. And those we don’t, who somehow put outside the boundaries of our community.
Yehuda: One of the weird things about podcasting, and I feel it today and I feel it it all the time, is I, I find myself in parasocial relationships with people who I don’t speak to and for whom it’s asymmetrical. And people say this to me all the time, like, I, I’m, I feel like we’re in a conversation, but you never hear my side of the conversation.
And one of the things that that is a metaphor for is a little bit about what we have become as human beings in a global world. We are so deeply intertwined with people in ways that transcend borders. Social media has done this, international commerce has done it, the capacity for global tourism. All of these things, like we have this mythical notion that our worlds are circumscribed by physical borders, but not very little about how we behave as people lives in those structures anymore, right? Local geography is far less significant. And state geography and borders geography.
What wisdom can you offer us to help us think about what functions borders can continue to serve, right, in ways that they will still matter to us, but they don’t need to be rendered with this kind of ideological power that no longer tells the truth of who we’re becoming as human beings?
Seyla: Yes, yes, yes, absolutely. I think that democratic self-governance, whatever our communities are, need boundaries more than borders. Militarily guided, you know, governed borders over which human beings, you know, fight and die, and our world is a world now increasingly of wars and conflicts. These borders are increasingly also contradicting our lived our lived experience, but we do need, we do need boundaries in terms of structures of self-governance.
I say, lift your eyes above the level of the state and look also below the level of the state. I think in our world it’s, it’s, it’s very hard to avoid the state, but there is a great deal that is happening in the sub-superstructures in which the state is embedded, but we don’t pay enough attention to the regional, the communal, the lay. And that, I think, is also very significant in terms of sites for building human solidarity.
The amount of human interaction and relationship across two sides of the Mexican-US border are so much more intense than anything that ICE or asylum officers can define. And I think we can say that about a great many situations in our world as well. So, boundaries, yes, but boundaries are not necessarily equivalent to borders.
Yehuda: Seyla, thank you so much for being on the show today. Thank you all to all of you who showed up here in person. I’m so grateful we were able to have this deep conversation. It’s like a bucket list item for me.
Seyla: Thank you very much.
