Book Review: Statelessness in the Caribbean: The Paradox of Belonging in a Postnational World (original) (raw)
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International Migration
Gender discrimination as a risk factor for statelessness has been understood as direct discrimination whereby legal frameworks prohibit mothers from conferring their nationality. This article discusses research findings from the Dominican Republic where indirect gender discrimination, evident in documentation and birth registration practices applicable to Haitian migrants and descendants, is causing matrilineal transmission of statelessness. Restricting access to citizenship has become a form of migration control, just as the creation of temporary, ad hoc status forms allows the state to sidestep responsibilities for migrant incorporation. If the links between gender and statelessness are not only legal, but also historical, structural, and procedural, then disrupting this cycle requires more than legal reform. For advocacy campaigns, such as UNHCR's #IBelong Campaign and the Global Campaign for Equal Nationality Rights, to be successful, they must adopt a broader interpretation of the relationship between gender and statelessness, based on CEDAW's substantive conception of gender equality.
2013
Based on an ongoing empirical study of legal exclusion in the Dominican Republic, this article discusses the institutionalisation of difference by governmental institutions. In the Dominican Republic, the symbolic opposition to the neighbour Haiti has been formalised through legislation in the course of the 20 th century aimed at excluding Haitian immigrants. Today, the legal exclusion of Dominicans of Haitian descent reformulates the way identity and difference are expressed. Analysing the differentiated legal position-i.e. in my case the position of a legal resident vs. an irregular immigrant-I will show in this article that the structural power relations race, class, and gender can most convincingly be understood as heuristic devices that have to be used together, not separated.
Doctoral Thesis, 2018
This empirical, multidisciplinary study offers a critical perspective into social policy architectures primarily in relation to questions of race, national identity and belonging in the Americas. It is the first to identify a connection between the universal provision of legal identity in the Dominican Republic with arbitrary measures to restrict access to citizenship paperwork from populations of (largely, but not exclusively) Haitian descent. The study highlights the current gap in global policy that overlooks the possible alienating effects of social inclusion measures, particularly in countries that discriminate against migrant-descended populations. It also supports concerns in scholarship regarding the dangers of identity management, noting that as administrative systems improve, new insecurities and uncertainties can develop (Seltzer and Anderson, 2001; Bigo, 2006; Lyon, 2009). The project therefore serves as a warning about the potential use of social policy architectures for authoritarian practices. In this regard, it offers a timely critique of global policy measures to provide all people everywhere with a legal identity in the run-up to the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Borders, independence and post-colonial ties : the role of the state in Caribbean migration
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Journal of British Studies, 2014
This essay explores debates over political membership and rights within empire from the interwar British Caribbean. Although no formal status of imperial, British, or colonial citizenship existed in this era, British Caribbeans routinely hailed each other as meritorious local “citizens,” demanded political rights due them as “British citizens,” and decried rulers' failure to treat colored colonials equally with other “citizens” of the empire. In the same years, the hundreds of thousands of British West Indians who labored in circum-Caribbean republics like the United States, Panama, Cuba, Venezuela, and Costa Rica experienced firsthand the international consolidation of formal citizenship as a state-issued credential ensuring mobility and abode. This convergence pushed British Caribbeans at home and abroad to question the costs of political disfranchisement and the place of race within empire. The vernacular political philosophy they developed in response importantly complements...
2014
This thesis seeks to understand how the ‘free movement of CARICOM nationals’ (FMCN) and intra-regional migration have become securitised in Barbados. The key aim of the thesis is to understand the social facts constitutive of the FMCN in Barbados. The thesis presents data on key securitising actors and audiences in Barbados. It analyses how Caribbean Community (CARICOM) migrants are understood to be posing threats and dangers to the Barbadian society and/or state. The processes, interactions, and discursive practices that lead to these conditions of security/insecurity are then examined in more detail. The thesis, on the basis of an instrumental case study of Barbados, advances social constructivism and the Copenhagen School’s concept of securitisation as the most appropriate theoretical framework for gaining an understanding on the FMCN and intra-CARICOM migration dynamics. Primary data are drawn from a selection of methods incorporating elite interviews with key state/institutiona...
Transnational Migration, the State, and Development: Reflecting on the “Diaspora Option”
Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism, 2013
In the program for the symposium that generated this special issue on rethinking Caribbean studies, the organizers asked, "Ought the 'Caribbean' be theorized under the sign 'diaspora'?" Here we take up this provocation to address "the national and transnational networks and linkages that have come to constitute the Caribbean beyond its geography and its political and subject formations," by reflecting on how these extraterritorial relationships come to matter for the contemporary state. 1 Long recognized as a space of migratory flows, over the past decade the region has witnessed a growing official interest in naming, mobilizing, and capitalizing on the homing instincts of diasporic populations. In this essay we reflect on how Caribbean studies might provoke critical attention to these emerging governmental strategies (what we call a nascent diasporic governmentality) in a neoliberalized Caribbean. James Clifford has differentiated between diaspora as a set of specific historical phenomena, as conceptual frame, and as political discourse, distinctions that are heuristically useful but often difficult to sustain in practice, and that also prompt us to think reflexively about how our institutionalintellectual projects are implicated in the current romance with diaspora in several quarters. 2 The