Islands of Sovereignty

Jeffrey Kahn's Islands of Sovereignty recounts the transformation of the Caribbean Sea from an area of mobility for Haitian nationals to a densely surveilled U.S. borderland.In the 1970s Guantánamo Harbor offered hospitality to Haitian nationals who were lost at sea, while in the 1990s the Guantánamo Bay naval base was comprised of camps where Haitian exiles were detained.The aim of this groundbreaking book is to describe and analyze the development of a U.S. maritime border in the Caribbean to prevent Haitian nationals from reaching the United States.Starting with the 1981 Haitian Migrant Interdiction Operations (HMIO), a new seascape emerged, defined by U.S. policies whose enforcement covers the territorial waters of a number of Caribbean states as well as the Guantánamo naval base of Cuba.This maritime borderland is patrolled by coast guard cutters that intercept exiles' boats, expedite asylum claims, and deport all but a few claimants.Kahn, who is both an anthropologist and a legal scholar, examines the tension between liberal constitutionalism that emphasizes the rule of law and the enactment of sovereign will that led to the creation of an offshore maritime border away from legal constraints.This complex, dense, and rich ethnography, based on two decades of fieldwork and research in state and NGO archives, offers a new conceptual approach to the study of maritime borderlands.Kahn identifies three modes of spatial organization in order to describe and analyze the "juridical-political geographies" of the Caribbean's maritime border (p.57).The first mode, familiar to any Caribbeanist anthropologist, legal scholar, or activist, and dubbed the "realist geography of alliance," originated in the Cold War geopolitical order and is based on international law.It distinguishes people who were granted asylum by the United States from economic migrants who were denied entry.Cuban nationals were categorized as political refugees while Haitian nationals, considered mere economic migrants, were deported back to Haiti without any processing of their asylum claims.The second mode of spatial organization operates along three kinds of border spaces: the territorial border, which delineates the land limits of the nation-state; the juridical border, which demarcates the areas where the federal judiciary is applicable; and the policing border, which reflects the border enforcement agents' surveilling, deterring, and detaining performances.Kahn convincingly demonstrates that if those three kinds of borderlands were aligned in the 1970s, they later diverged from each other with the extension of the policing border first into the high seas and the territorial waters of Haiti and subsequently to the areas around

Ancient history · Economic geography · Empire · Geography · Political science · Politics · Sovereignty · Diaspora, migration, transnational identity · History · Law · Migration and Labor Dynamics · Migration, Identity, and Health