Statelessness in the Caribbean. Kristy A. Belton
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been considerable strides in the machinery of human rights, political theory with respect to statelessness has hardly moved on since Arendt’s day” (Sawyer and Blitz 2011, 306). Most recent theoretical work on statelessness has taken two forms: the application of an Arendtian framework to explain how some nonstateless noncitizens—such as the sans papiers and others who live on the fringes of legality within their host states—are in a stateless situation;30 or the analysis of statelessness from a global ethics or justice perspective.31 No work to date has argued that statelessness is a form of forced displacement.
Victoria Redclift’s Statelessness and Citizenship: Camps and the Creation of Political Space (2013) is informed by a forced displacement lens through its analysis of the camp-based displacement of the formerly stateless Biharis of Bangladesh. Redclift’s focus, however, is on exposing the messiness of contemporary membership practices and on how individuals are able to negotiate, and maneuver between, the boundaries of citizenship inclusion and exclusion. I come at displacement from a different vantage point. Instead of illustrating how acts of citizenship are performed outside statist understandings of belonging from spaces of displacement,32 I argue in this book that we need to reconceptualize statelessness as a form of forced displacement in situ.33 One need not be encamped or physically pushed across borders to suffer the effects of displacement from home.
Thus, whereas David Hanauer describes how migrants and their host-state born children “are defined in essentialist terms as representatives of their heritage countries” and “are symbolically returned to their native lands” in the process (2011, 203), the case studies I present in this work reveal that the displacement suffered by the descendants of migrants who are at risk of statelessness is much more than symbolic. As I describe in Chapters 3 and 4, the Bahamian- and Dominican-born offspring of Haitian migrants are forcefully “returned” to a “native land” they have never seen (Haiti) via practices of citizenship denial or deprivation in the countries of their birth.
Moreover, although other noncitizens, such as refugees, travelers, and different types of migrants, have been the subjects of “an explosion of work which considers the role of place in the production of outsiders” or people “who are said to be ‘out-of-place’” (Cresswell 2004, 103), stateless people have not been included in this scholarship. Reconceptualizing statelessness as forced displacement highlights how practices of citizenship deprivation and denial render the stateless “out of place,” disrupting their ability to carry out key life projects, be self-determining agents, and access rights and protections. Furthermore, it illustrates how being forced “out of place,” whether by being rendered liminal subjects or by being made to take on another state’s nationality, affects the stateless’ sense of place identity and belonging in very concrete ways.
Place identity answers the question—Who am I?—by countering—Where am I? or Where do I belong? From a social psychological perspective, place identities are thought to arise because places, as bounded locales imbued with personal, social, and cultural meanings, provide a significant framework in which identity is constructed, maintained, and transformed. Like people, things, and activities, places are an integral part of the social world of everyday life; as such, they become important mechanisms through which identity is defined and situated. (Cuba and Hummon 1993, 112)
When people lack a national home, it affects their “expectations for the future” (Weil 1955 quoted in Relph 1976, 38) and psychologically displaces them, even though they remain physically rooted. They consequently lack “a secure point from which to look out on the world, a firm grasp of [their] position in the order of things” (38). The realm of statelessness then is more than one where the law ceases to operate or where rights are difficult to achieve. It is one, as Arendt recognized, in which one’s place in the world becomes ambiguous, or even outright negated.
Reconceptualizing statelessness as a form of forced displacement in situ is important for several reasons. First, statelessness is a human rights issue that most people do not know exists. As UNHCR admitted, it is “one of the most neglected areas of the global human rights agenda” (UNHCR 2011b, 2). While the plight of refugees, IDPs, and other forced migrants has garnered the attention of the international, humanitarian, policy-making, and scholarly communities over the decades, statelessness has not. It is only in the past three years that the first Global Forum on Statelessness34 was held and that UNHCR launched its global #IBelong Campaign to End Statelessness, even though statelessness has existed since before the organization’s inception and is one of its primary mandates. It is also only in the past few years that scholarly interest in the subject has begun to develop and that regional intergovernmental organizations, such as the OAS and the European Union (EU),35 have begun to address the issue.
The lack of attention given to statelessness is problematic because stateless people, as I describe in Chapters 2 and 5, are susceptible to a range of human rights violations as noncitizens everywhere. As UN Secretary General (UNSG) António Guterres declares, “The daily suffering of millions of stateless people is an affront to humanity” (cited in van Waas 2013, n. pag.). Yet because their situation typically lacks the humanitarian or emergency nature of other types of forced displacement—they may live in democracies and face little to no persecution; they may have never had to leave their home due to conflict or crisis; they may outwardly appear like any citizen you meet—their particular plight has often gone unrecognized or been made secondary to other human rights concerns. But, as I explain later in the text, statelessness is an insidious form of displacement, with invidious effects. Reconceptualizing statelessness as forced displacement in situ thus demands that we consider statelessness as important to address as other types of forced displacement.
Second, embedding statelessness within the forced displacement framework forces us to interrogate our assumptions about the relationship between displacement and movement. In an insightful article, Stephen Lubkemann argues for the need to critically examine the assumed relationship between displacement and mobility that permeates forced migration and refugee studies. Examining the case of the 1977–1992 Mozambican civil war, Lubkemann describes how those who were unable to flee the conflict suffered “a form of displacement in place” (2008, 457) as the war prevented them from using various forms of “mobility-based” coping strategies (464). Because of this, Lubkemann argues that displacement should be redefined as “immobilization” generated by the involuntary “disruption of key life projects” (468, 471n8). Reconceptualizing statelessness as a form of forced displacement that takes place in situ broadens our understanding of the diverse forms that forced displacement can take and illustrates that one does not have to be forced to flee one’s home to suffer its effects. One can be physically rooted, yet displaced.
Third, the forced displacement in situ framework illuminates the myriad, yet subtle, ways in which democracies in nonconflict and noncrisis situations engage in forced displacement. Thus, whereas the focus within forced migration, conflict, and human rights studies has typically been upon those who are made to move (whether internally or externally) as a result of ethnic conflict, insurgency, persecution, foreign invasion, and other types of crises (Wood 1994, 612; Troeller 2003, 50),36 the comparative case analysis presented here reveals that democracies can—and do—engage in the forced displacement of peoples through legal, bureaucratic, and political means that have consequences just as portentous as the more commonly studied drivers of forced migration, such as environmental catastrophe, civil war, or persecution.
Methods
In order to address the aforementioned gaps in the human rights, forced migration, and (non)citizenship literatures, and to challenge the postnational claim that human rights have decoupled from citizenship, I conduct a comparative case study of statelessness in the Caribbean democracies of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic. I contend that the Caribbean stands as a valid testing ground for evaluating postnational claims about the decoupling of human rights from citizenship because “no other region” in the developing world “has had, for so long, so many