The intellectual curiosity with understanding poverty can be traced to political theorist Hannah Arendt's formative essay The Social Question. Her analysis claims that the impoverished commit to revolution when the nation-state strips away its bare necessities (Arendt, 1965, p.54). However, inverting Arendt’s argument begs a few central points of departure: Does the nation- state need to deprive, subordinate, and exclude a specific subset of the population in order to operate? How might we flip Arendt’s perspective and question whether the modern nation-state requires suspending its population from those needs? And what specific populations must the nation-state manage in order to expand?

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Drawing from theoretical frameworks developed by Benedict Anderson and Giorgio Agamben, this essay argues that nation-states must produce and regulate refugees as an a priori condition to fulfill their various political and economic operations. In politics, the refugee is leveraged as a “common enemy” for the nation to imagine itself in binary opposition against, which becomes an essential predicate for legal and juridical rule. Additionally, in the economic context, the fugitive functions as the enzyme for the “state of exception," which is required to sustain the modes of production. Both axes of interpretation reveal that the refugee is a necessary, yet unstable, figure for the enduring proliferation of the nation-state.

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The political domain requires an imagined enemy to unite the “exceptional” nation. Benedict Anderson's insightful work in Imagined Communities provides the principle scaffolding to frame how refugees become construed as the “enemy” of the nation in order to galvanize national cohesion. For Anderson, nations are “imagined political communities – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (Anderson, 1991, pp. 5-6). Specifying the nation as “limited and sovereign” suggests that the nationalist imaginary depends on a boundary point to delineate “us” from “them”. The historical archive demonstrates that nation-states relegate “them” into the periphery on the grounds of racialized or civilizational inferiority, which ultimately protects and sustains settler superiority. Waziyatawin Angela Wilson's rendering of this tension is especially insightful; she aptly explains how in the historical archive, settlers are depicted as “‘innocent,’ ‘pure,’ [and] ‘brave,’” whereas “[t]he Dakota, on the other hand, [are] depicted as ‘savages,’ ... ‘wretches,’ [and] ‘beasts,’”(Wilson, 2004, pp. 191-192). The archival illustration of natives as the “enemy” dialectically produces the settler nation-state as the “noble higher authority” with the responsibility of either assimilating or exterminating its binary opposite. In turn, the purportedly “exceptional” nation-state grants itself the sovereign right to rule in order to govern the “hostile” or “dangerous” threat. As a result, the national imaginary, predicated on dishonoring the Other and celebrating the nation-state, emerges as the crucial premise for legal and political protocol. In the context of Indigenous communities, such violence comes into fruition through the sovereign nation-state's right to seize native land in the service of sustaining civilizational projects, which requires the displacement and debilitation of Indigenous communities. Constraining the native as the "enemy" in civilizational discourses ratifies the nation-state as inherently superior in the national imaginary and installs the native into a state of refuge in order to galvanize a coherent vision of “us”.

In addition to the political, the economic domain requires the refugee to produce a state of exception, which becomes the essential predicate for capitalist gain. In his groundbreaking work State of Exception, political philosopher Giorgio Agamben explores how governments digress into authoritarianism by imagining various crises in order to warrant the suspension of legal norms in the name of “securing” the state (Agamben, 2005, p. 28). The state of exception is produced through the image of the refugee, which is imagined as an “impending crisis” that must be “exterminated” and opens the door to various modalities of regulation under the paradigm of capitalism. For instance, historian Bruno Cabanes illustrates how Russian refugees in the aftermath of World War I “represented the possibility of additional social unrest. Lacking any formal national ties, they were viewed ... on top of everything else, an impossibly heavy economic burden.” (Cabanes, 2014, p.185). In addition to facing exclusion due to assumptions about “unstable” personhood, Russian refugees were retracted from the nation upon the brutal calculation of capitalist economics, which cast the refugee as an encroaching threat that carries looming debt. Nevertheless, even if the Russian refugee was granted membership into the nation- state, they were still exploited and subject to torturous work conditions in host countries such as Poland and Germany to maximize profit (Cabanes, 2014, p. 143). In other words, from an economic vantage, the refugee is produced through inclusion into the nation in order to be exploited for economic gain and excluded from the nation to create a state of exception, which enables the nation-state to exercise extralegal and extrajudicial modes of fiscal policy in the name of “securing” its citizenry. Put differently; the refugee is rendered as the necessary condition for creating a state of exception, which warrants the execution and production of an economic policy dedicated to “managing” the fugitive and their looming “burden.”

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In sum, the idea of the refugee is mandatory for both political and economic apparatuses. The political necessitates the national imaginary, which requires the dialectical maneuver of negating the Other to validate the self as superior; in the prism of settler colonialism, the negation of native life to exceptionalize settler sociality is a precondition for the nation-state to exercise the right to sovereignty and achieve “progress”. In addition to the political crucible, the economic status quo needs the refugee to fuel a state of exception, which produces new modes of profit for the nation-state. In the context of World War I, Russian refugees were both exploited for their labor in host countries as part of a “rebuilding” process and as a symbolic figure to frame the nation as “on the brink of disaster” in order to justify extralegal modalities of fiscal policy predicated on the calculus that the refugee carries “risk” and “debt.” 

These logics from generations ago still persist today. The nation, phrased through the rhetoric of paranoia, is visualized as on the “cusp of collapse” due to an impending crisis that challenges the national imaginary. In turn, “controlling” the refugee has become the sole purpose of various institutional structures, such as the implementation of a prison industrial complex that profits off of indexing the fugitive as “dangerous” and subjecting them to a structure of fines and fees, the military- industrial complex that generates surpluses by selling weapons in order to eliminate “threats” in the third world, or imperialist finance institutions such as the World Bank or the IMF that trap developing nations into predatory economic schemas. Against the backdrop of both the political and the economic, inverting Arendt's prescription that revolution is contingent upon the state's subtraction of “necessities” toward an exploration of what the state needs in the first place reveals that at stake in our modern terrain is a precarious model of governance where groups are either excluded or included by the nation-state to preserve (unsustainable) modes of sovereignty.