Statelessness in the Caribbean. Kristy A. Belton
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nationality from their alleged country of nationality (Haiti).
I also assess the status of these countries’ treaty ratifications regarding statelessness or the right to a nationality,55 and the reports of various NGOs and the UN on the subject to understand what treaty obligations these states ought to have and whether they are fulfilling them in practice. I examine pertinent judicial cases in the Dominican context as well—such as the Case of the Girls Yean and Bosico v. the Dominican Republic (IACtHR 2005) and Sentence TC/0168/13 (Government of the Dominican Republic 2013e)—to understand their impact on Dominican membership practices.
Using my interview data and these primary and secondary sources, I demonstrate that far from being an institution whose “limits” have become “inventively irrelevant” (Soysal 1994, 162), citizenship in a state is increasingly important to access and exercise rights, as well as corresponding freedoms and protections, especially for those who are noncitizens everywhere. Moreover, states continue to jealously guard their sovereign right to demarcate and defend these limits, even if under the cover of seemingly neutral laws or bureaucratic procedures. This results in a form of forced displacement that is just as injurious as the forced displacement that we typically associate with movement under crisis or conflict conditions.
Because I find that citizenship continues to be a necessary status to hold in our allegedly postnational era, I move from theory testing to theory building in the final part of the book and offer a just membership framework for addressing statelessness. I contend that interpreting statelessness through such a framework is crucial in a world where states engage in arbitrary and discriminatory membership practices under the cover of law and where a large gap exists between the operation of said law and practice.
Book Overview
In order to make the case that the stateless face a peculiar and injurious form of forced displacement, even as they remain physically rooted in the countries of their birth, the book is divided into three parts. This first section, “Reconsidering Forced Displacement,” discusses the debate over the relevance of citizenship in an era of human rights and the alleged waning of state sovereignty. It situates my argument in the existing scholarship on citizenship, noncitizenship, statelessness, and forced migration, describing why statelessness is an issue of global, regional, community, and individual import. This section underscores the lack of attention that has been paid to the stateless (those who do not cross borders but who are nevertheless “noncitizen”) and illustrates how the focus on mobility within forced migration studies, especially as a result of conflict, persecution, or crisis, has served to make the plight of these populations largely invisible. It also draws attention to the ways liberal democracies around the world have engaged in practices that render people liminal subjects or make noncitizens out of citizens in the post-9/11 environment. This book thus speaks to broader questions of belonging, democratic regime behavior, and human rights access globally.
The second part, “Democracies as Engines of Forced Displacement,” forms the empirical backbone of the book. Herein I provide support for the argument presented in the first section that liberal democracies are engaging in practices of forced displacement against those they consider “Other” within. While human rights and postnational scholarship tend to portray liberal democracies as those that allow for a person to enjoy rights, freedoms, and protections without formally belonging to the state, I use data gathered from the aforementioned original field interviews, supported by other primary and secondary sources, to demonstrate how the developing world democracies of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic are forcibly displacing Bahamian- and Dominican-born persons of Haitian descent into liminality or making them become Haitian nationals against their will.
It should be noted that while the stateless have occasionally been referred to as liminals—or some such similar term—no work to date has used anthropologist Victor Turner’s work on liminality to assess whether the stateless are indeed liminals. I use Turner’s markers of “invisibility,” “impurity,” “rightlessness,” and “reflection,” which describe the liminal’s condition and state of mind during liminality, to examine how liminality affects the stateless. While the stateless face varying degrees of invisibility and rightlessness, as well as treatment as “impure,” unlike Turner’s liminals, they do not share the ability to return to society (or the communities of their birth) on their own terms and with a new identity (citizenship in the case of the stateless). They thus remain displaced in the realm of the “betwixt and between.”
The final portion of the book, “Noncitizen Insiders and the Right to Belong,” explains the effects of forced displacement in situ upon people who are “noncitizen insiders” (Belton 2011); that is, those who are neither migrants nor citizens of the country of their birth and residence. Drawing on the detailed findings of my case studies, I demonstrate how rooted displacement affects these people’s sense of identity, as well as their ability to enjoy human rights and be self-determining agents. It is here that I conclude that the greatest “calamity” to befall the stateless is not that they lack the “right to belong to some kind of organized community” (Arendt [1948] 2004, 377), but that they lack the right to belong to the specific communities of their birth. I therefore propose a “human right to belong” and justify it over the conventional understanding that states alone should determine their membership.
Chapter Summaries
Chapter 2 provides an overview of statelessness beginning with Arendt’s experience and ending with its contemporary development. It describes the many ways in which a person may become stateless, the problems associated with this condition from an individual, community, and state vantage point, and international efforts to address it. The chapter demonstrates that exclusion from an “organized [political] community,” as in Arendt’s time, continues to be problematic in the twenty-first century. In contradistinction to Arendt’s time, however, Chapter 2 shows that statelessness is not a “Europe-only” phenomenon, one of cross-border movements, or one that is necessarily generated by conflict, crisis, or persecution. Stateless people are found globally, within all regime types, and are generally physically rooted in a place, even though displaced in other ways.
Chapters 3 and 4 bring the discussion of global statelessness to the state level with case studies of The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, respectively. These chapters detail how democracies can forcibly displace people under noncrisis and nonconflict situations via legal, political, and bureaucratic means. Specifically, Chapter 3 explains how seemingly neutral citizenship laws, when situated within a politicized citizenship-granting process and combined with bureaucratic inefficiencies, work together to displace Bahamian-born persons of primarily Haitian descent56 into liminality or into the category of Haitian national, often without confirming that said persons are Haitian nationals in practice.
Chapter 4 continues the analysis of how the human right to a nationality is implemented in practice by examining the ways in which the Dominican state erects boundaries of belonging against the racialized “Other” within its borders. Via constitutional amendment, the retroactive application of laws, and arbitrary bureaucratic procedures, the chapter demonstrates how people can be turned into foreigners in their own country. Both chapters thus illustrate the precariousness of belonging under state-defined conditions and the ways in which individuals can be forcibly displaced while remaining “in place.”
Whereas Chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate how two democracies of the developing world are engaging in forced displacement within their territories, Chapter 5 examines the effects of forced displacement in situ from an individual perspective. Using Victor Turner’s analysis of liminality as a basis, the chapter illustrates