by Marianna Bezhanyan
University of California, Los Angeles
2026 is undoubtedly a year of war on refugees and on refugeeness as a phenomenon on U.S. soil. We are witnessing, in real time, the rewriting of refugee law, the cancellation of humanitarian programs, and the reclassification of refugees admitted under previous administrations as “otherwise inadmissible.” The architects of this shapeshifting immigration system continue to portray refugees as people in transition: waiting for resolution, rescue, or return.
But what if this condition is not temporary for millions? What if statelessness and exclusion are not failures of the system but essential to how it operates?
Drawing from Sylvia Wynter’s theory of the “genre of Man,” I argue that refugees, especially those who are racialized and on humanitarian parole programs/temporary protected status, embody a distinct category: Man 3, a figure structurally excluded from citizenship, mobility, and recognition. As a political refugee and artist, I write from within this position not to personalize the crisis but to clarify how it is deliberately produced through modern systems of border control, humanitarianism, and racial capitalism.
My last name means “Refugee.” My great-great-great-grandfather got it at a Soviet orphanage, where he ended up after fleeing the Armenian Genocide as an infant and spending a few years in Iran. At the same time, my great-great-great-grandmother was a refugee in Syria. The next generation became White Guard refugees, escaping the Bolsheviks. My grandma (not great-great this time) fled the 1988 earthquake in Armenia and moved to the Russian Republic of the USSR. And four years ago, my mom and I fled Russia as political refugees.
Being a refugee isn’t just a part of my life, it’s the context of my family and ancestry. I don’t associate myself with Armenia, Russia, the USSR, Iran, Syria, or even the U.S., where I live now. My state is statelessness, and that’s the framework and experience through which I speak, write, and advocate.
Aiming to better understand the experiences of my community, I enrolled in a graduate seminar at UCLA called Refugee Antagonisms. While Sylvia Wynter’s On Being Human as Praxis (2015) wasn’t on therequired reading list, her influence echoed throughout the course as many engaged with her and Katherine McKittrick’s framework. The ideas Wynter introduces are, in some ways, so structured and intricate they feel almost mathematical, yet they also invite speculation, imagination, and transformation. It was within and around this framework that I began to write.
Sylvia Wynter critiques what she calls the “genre of Man”: the colonial invention of “the man” as a category that is white, Western, capitalist, and male, which continues to dictate who counts as fully human and whose life is expendable. In her framework, the refugee (especially if racialized or from the Global South) exists outside this constructed category, seen as disposable, criminalized, or only temporarily included through frameworks like humanitarian parole programs when politically convenient. This system doesn’t seek to abolish violence but to govern life and death through who is recognized as “man” under the state’s terms.
Wynter warns against the trap of what she calls “Man 2,” (The Secular, Rational, Economic “Man”) a category where people of color, migrants, or other marginalized groups are incorporated into the system but only in ways that maintain its core structure. Man 2 exists as a multicultural subject: allowed participation, but only under conditions that do not fundamentally challenge white supremacy (in this case, Multicultural White Supremacy as defined by Dylan Rodriguez in response to Jody Melamed’s Multicultural Neoliberalism). The system rewards those who assimilate, those who meet an arbitrary set of requirements: being within the education system, speaking English fluently and without an accent, adhering to moderate Christianity or secularism, and avoiding overt expressions of religious or cultural identity. These factors create a racialized standard of inclusion, where even non-white individuals who meet these criteria are absorbed into the system while others remain excluded.
As Sylvia Wynter explains in On Being Human as Praxis (2015): “To give an example: here we are, we are talking and thinking. We are, in fact, reflexly talking and thinking in terms of Darwin’s biocosmogonically chartered definitive version—in The Descent of Man (1871)—of the British bourgeoisie’s ruling class’s earlier reinvention of Man’s civic humanist homo politicus as that of liberal monohumanist Man2 as homoeconomicus, together with its now fully desupernaturalized sociogenically encoded order of consciousness. These are the very terms, therefore, in which we ourselves, in now historically postcolonial/postapartheid contexts, are.”
I believe there is a particular difference between the world of Man 2, where non-white people are included in the system as a form of the system’s self-defense and repackaging, and the experience of refugees, especially those of color, for whom this inclusion, even performative, does not hold true. While Wynter stops at Man 2 to mark the liberal-capitalist reinvention of Man as inclusive only in appearance, I argue we must recognize a further category, Man-3, for those whose exclusion is not resolved through assimilation but managed through administrative liminality and geopolitical containment.
Refugees, especially those on temporary humanitarian parole programs, do not fit into this framework of Man 2. Instead, they are what we might call “Man 3”: the permanently unsettled, stateless, and rightless body. My sociology professor, Cecilia Menjívar (2006), introduced a concept to explain the conditional status of TPS holders: liminal legality. In her research with Agadjanian and Oh, Menjívar (2006) examines the experiences of TPS holders, particularly that for them higher education offers little promised social mobility. Man-3 is not confined to a particular country or legal regime. It is the global byproduct of nation-state systems, humanitarian bureaucracies, and capitalist extraction that rely on managing populations rather than integrating them. That includes refugees in the US, Europe, and around the world.
It’s obvious if we look at what’s happening to refugees in the U.S. today: humanitarian parole programs for Ukrainians, Venezuelans, and Afghans are being canceled; the general refugee program that once helped people like Syrians is gone; the CBP One app, which allowed people to request parole at the border, has also been shut down. At the same time, none of the conflicts or catastrophes that pushed these people to leave their countries have ended.
All of this shows that refugee life is not treated as a humanitarian non-negotiable. It is very much negotiable: rewritten, suspended, or erased depending on political convenience. In these decisions, economics and geopolitics are placed far above the value of human lives. This is exactly how the world creates and controls stateless groups.
If Man 2 is allowed conditional inclusion to obscure the system’s racial and colonial hierarchies, Man 3 is left outside altogether. Refugees lack not only the criteria of whiteness applied to some non-white immigrants but also the pathways to even attempt integration. Their status is rarely stable; they are often relegated to precarious low-wage labor or self-employment, lacking social mobility, or access to professional fields. Their presence is tolerated only as long as it serves a political function, but the moment they become inconvenient (whether economically or geopolitically), they are expelled, ignored, or criminalized.
While it might make mathematical or transitional sense to label refugees as “Man 1.5,” that framing runs counter to my argument. Assimilation is not a substep toward inclusion, nor should the condition of refugees be viewed as a regression from Man 2. Refugees are not behind, they are here, now, and their exclusion is not residual but deliberate, advanced, and systemically maintained, created by the new colonial regimes. In a global context where borders, surveillance, and national identities are more refined than ever, statelessness is not a remnant of the past but a modern technology of exclusion. Refugees represent not an incomplete inclusion but a new form of engineered disposability, one that demands we recognize them as occupying a distinct category: Man-3.
Wynter’s theory is grounded in the idea that being human is not a given, but a praxis: a socially and historically constructed process shaped by economic, cultural, and political forces. Building on this, I propose that migration politics itself functions as a form of praxis: a site where the boundaries of humanness are actively negotiated, enforced, and denied. While theorists like Agamben (1998) describe refugees as “bare life” and Arendt (1951) sees them as people without the “right to have rights,” the category of Man-3 adds a racial and colonial specificity that marks this exclusion not as accidental but as designed, produced through global systems of border militarization, humanitarianism, and extractive capitalism.
Recognizing Man-3 is not simply a diagnostic act: it is a demand to abandon the liberal fantasy of inclusion through assimilation. Any project aimed at reimagining justice must begin not with those the system can accommodate, but with those it was designed to expel. If Wynter urges us to imagine a new genre of the human, we must ask: what kind of world becomes possible when we center the figure of the refugee, not as a crisis, but as the clearest indictment of the world as it is?
References
Agamben G (1998) Homo Sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford: Stanford
University Press.
Arendt H (1951) The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Brace.
Melamed J (2011) Represent and Destroy: Rationalizing Violence in the New Racial
Capitalism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Menjívar C (2006) Liminal legality: Salvadoran and Guatemalan immigrants’ lives in the
United States. American Journal of Sociology 111(4): 999–1037.
Rodríguez D (2020) White Reconstruction: Domestic Warfare and the Logics of Genocide.
New York: Fordham University Press.
Wynter S (2015) On being human as praxis. In: McKittrick K (ed.) On Being Human as
Praxis. Durham: Duke University Press.
Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons.
