Arendt Studies

Volume 6, 2022

Benjamin P. Davis
Pages 43-57

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.