Abstract
No! The Caribbean is not a tropical paradise! And by the way . . . Today’s world is not a Postnational Wonderland defined by “blurred boundaries, flexible citizenships, and denationalized rights”! It rather is an inferno for many stateless people! Therefore, we desperately need to institute the universal right to belong. The right each one of us has to claim a nationality!
I start this review with these words because Stateless in the Caribbean is both a sound scholarly piece and a manifesto. I mostly have praise for this book and what it accomplishes. Above all, Stateless in the Caribbean is an important and much needed book. One strong aspect of the book has to do with its compelling challenge of postnational arguments about the alleged decoupling of human rights from citizenship occurring around the world. For a long time now, these arguments have helped create an optimistic outlook about liberal democracies and the plight of noncitizens within them. The book points to these arguments’ biases and flaws with much clarity, with incisive interrogations and argumentations based on the comparative examination of the plight of stateless Bahamian Haitians and Dominican Haitians. Belton approaches citizenship critically, noting that citizens continue to exercise hegemony over the noncitizen, and therefore, citizenship structures often operate in the service of oppression.
Belton shows not only that citizenship is still very consequential and that state sovereignty is not waning, but also that the world’s liberal democracies actively implement legal and bureaucratic practices that produce noncitizens and nonbelonging. And, in contrast to what is widely assumed, Belton also notes that forced mobility is not a necessary condition for the creation of statelessness. This is an important point with implications for social scientists’ descriptions and analysis of the mechanisms, impacts, and diversity of displacement, as well as the experience of citizenship.
Belton says, “Statelessness [is] a form forced displacement in situ [. . .] One need not be encamped or physically pushed across borders to suffer the effects of displacement from home” (p. 13). With this argument and the comparative case studies, the book facilitates the meshing of the scholarly and the normative in the reader’s head. It transmits through argument and fact a sense of urgency and indignation at the oppressive and much less scrutinized ways in which states around the world turn citizens into “out-of-place” or placeless Others even without implementing any form of forced movement.
In both Caribbean islands—The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic—the state has engaged in practices that oppress citizens of Haitian descent. In the former, Bahamian-born persons of Haitian ancestry are legally denied citizenship for the first 18 years of their life and then provided with the chance (not with the guarantee opportunity) of acquiring Bahamian citizenship when they become adults. This produces an ambiguous status and translates into imposed nonbelonging. Some among the affected have opted to flee the island where they were born (even under unsafe conditions) or even renounce their acquired Bahamian citizenship. These choices show the severity of the sense of exclusion and nonbelonging among these individuals. They expose the direct and indirect discrimination they experience in everyday life. These choices seem even more desperate if one considers that it is not completely clear if ancestral Haiti would ever consider them Haitian, or that many of them do not even have any experiential familiarity with Haiti. And here is yet another strength of Stateless in the Caribbean in need of recognition. This book brings to light the voices of a few from this largely unknown group along with thorough analysis of the contexts in which their life stories have unfolded and continue to evolve day-by-day.
The situation involving Dominican Haitians is better known due to coverage in the international press. Attention grew after the declaration of La Sentencia (168–13) by the Dominican Constitutional Court on September 2013. La Sentencia rendered stateless thousands of Haitian Dominicans registered as Dominicans as far back as 1929. On 23 May 2014, the Court adopted the corrective naturalization Law 169-14 (Ley de Régimen Especial y Naturalización 169-14). Among other things, Law 169-14 outlines the process to regularize the identification records and proper documentation of people born in the Dominican Republic to undocumented parents who have been certified as nationals by the Dominican Republic, and also to those under the same circumstances but who have no such document. The corrective law applies strictly to birth registration, not actual birth in the Dominican Republic, however. And as the stories in the book make clear, this law will neither dismantle the root causes that produce the oppression against Dominican Haitians on the first place, nor combat the mechanisms through which this oppression is legitimized and maintained.
Belton brings back and applies her concept of “noncitizen insider” (2011) to categorize the conditions faced by both affected groups. I find the application of this concept to be helpful and important to her arguments. It helped Belton in the process of constructing thorough contextualization of the experience of statelessness and comparing the plight of the stateless to other groups, such as irregular citizens, refugees and other forced migrants. It also helped Belton point to the reality that Bahamian and Dominican Haitians are not migrants nor are they citizens within their country of birth. They are “displaced in situ” while simultaneously being legally excluded from formal belonging, rendered liminal through different means, and having precarious access and opportunity to challenge their statelessness through existing institutions. Nonetheless, the noncitizen insider concept helped shed light on how the two groups experience multifaceted oppressions that include not only lack of rights but also experiences of liminality, invisibility, stereotyping, dehumanization associated with being perceived and treated as impure, polluting, and inferior, and being prevented from formally belonging to their countries of birth. This concept is certainly relevant to scholars in the field of forced migration, human rights, citizenship and mobility, and other related fields.
Another important feature is that the book offers clear recommendations for changing the plight of the stateless. Belton invites us to advance a political agenda in which the human right to a nationality and belonging can be recognized based on global distributive justice principles. Accordingly, such human right platform can be justified based on the magnitude of mobility and population growth in the world today, which Belton suggests are likely to guarantee future increases in the numbers of forced migrants around the world and forced the issue. One even finds ideas in chapter 6 that sound like social movement slogans: the right to “become formal members of the state,” have a “space and a place to carry out life projects,” and “be self-determining agents in the place [we] consider home” (p. 177).
This well-conceived and well-written book carries few negative traits. There are a few issues worth mentioning, however. First, the interview data presented in chapters 3 and 4 was markedly scarce, especially in chapter 4 about Dominican Haitians. There was not much symmetry in the length of fieldwork and the number of interviews in each research site, as a result, the Bahamian case, which seemed to have involved more fieldwork time, emerged as a better presented case than the Dominican one. Second, there was just partial consideration, maybe indirect treatment of the resistance strategies by the stateless (i.e. their individual/collective agency) and their allies in both contexts. Such discussions would have complemented chapter 6 very well. Third, the racialization of Haitians certainly plays a part in their being so unwanted even in the Bahamas where the population is less racially mixed than the Dominican population. A conversation between race and racism theory (or theories) and the Belton’s theoretical framework would have yielded interesting insights relevant to a wider audience of scholars.
Finally, there are two specificities of the Dominican case that are important and that the author missed. First, in the Dominican Republic, the language of rights is deployed against stateless Dominican Haitians by government officials and racist groups and social agents. The racist discourse portrays the stateless as overprotected by international organizations and powerful states which allegedly end up overprotecting the stateless’ rights and infringing upon the sovereignty of the Dominican state. This is a powerful discourse and major obstacle that progressive groups and the stateless themselves have to deal with in their fight against oppression. One final point is that this book does what some involved in the conversation concerning Dominican Haitians do: taking Haitian society and their elites for granted. Haitian society and its social, cultural, political dynamics need not be left out in studies of the stateless and Haitian diaspora. This is often the case, and it is repeated in this book. But none of these points come close to diminish this timely and delightful piece of scholarship that is, Stateless in the Caribbean. This book would be an excellent required reading in a diverse group of graduate and undergraduate social science and humanities courses.