addition to fieldwork, I use various primary and secondary sources to challenge the postnational claim of the decoupling of human rights from citizenship and to examine the ways in which democracies engage in forced displacement. I examine the nationality, migration laws, and constitutions of The Bahamas, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti—as well as legal assessments by experts on the latter country—to identify how individuals ought to be covered as nationals under a given law in theory. I stress “in theory” because, in practice, individuals may fall under the operation of a given state’s law as a national, but in reality they do not possess said state’s citizenship. Both The Bahamas and the Dominican Republic, for example, deny that statelessness is an issue on their territories. They point to Article 11 of the Haitian Constitution, which declares that any person born of a Haitian mother or father who has not renounced her or his Haitian citizenship is also a Haitian at birth (Government of Haiti 2011). These governments’ position is that the offspring of Haitian migrants born on their soil are Haitian citizens through their parents. It therefore does not matter whether or not they have Bahamian or Dominican citizenship.
Yet, as UNHCR’s Handbook on Protection of Stateless Persons makes clear, determining whether an individual is stateless “requires a careful analysis of how a State applies its nationality laws in an individual’s case in practice” (2014g, 12; italics added). UNHCR asserts that “The reference to ‘law’ in Article 1(1) [of the 1954 statelessness convention] should be read broadly to encompass not just legislation, but also ministerial decrees, regulations, orders, judicial case law (in countries with a tradition of precedent) and, where appropriate, customary practice” (12) when determining whether a person is stateless. Such an approach, they contend, “may lead to a different conclusion than one derived from a purely objective analysis of the application of nationality laws of a country to an individual’s case” (13). Using such an approach, I find—and illustrate in Chapters 3 and 4—that many individuals of Haitian descent, born in The Bahamas or the Dominican Republic of Haitian migrants do not fall under the operation of Haitian law in practice. They are consequently forced into liminality—a place where they are denied or deprived of formal belonging to the country of their birth, but unable to enjoy effective 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
