Author Response: Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire

Post by Jeffrey S. Kahn, JD, PhD. Jeffrey is associate professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Davis, and a 2022-23 fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. An interdisciplinary scholar, he studied anthropology at the University of Chicago and law at Yale, after which he clerked for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. His research focuses on U.S. extraterritorial migration policing and the maritime networks Haitians continue to maintain in the shadow of U.S. securitization projects in the Caribbean.

Response to Peter Mancina’s review of Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire by Jeffrey S. Kahn (University of Chicago Press, 2019).

I want to begin by expressing my gratitude to Peter Mancina for his thoughtful review of Islands of Sovereignty and to Border Criminologies for hosting this discussion. My hope has long been that scholars of migration outside the United States would find Islands to be a useful text for grappling with questions related to the global spread of maritime migration policing and the attendant shifting terrain of the nation-state as a legal and political form. I’m delighted to have a chance to share some of the ideas from the book in this venue.

Empirically speaking, Islands offers a new sociolegal and historical anthropological account of the rise of U.S. maritime migration policing. Combining ethnography, oral histories, and a range of archival materials, the book delves into how a politically-mobilized Haitian activist community and their allied litigators engaged in hard-fought battles with US officials in ways that eventually remade the legal geography of the U.S. nation-state. This last point is key, as this new spatial model—a novel jurisdictional scaffolding, if you will—later became useful to European nation-states and Australia decades later, a part of the story deeply familiar to the audience of this blog. Even for those well-read in the history of interdiction, Islands brings to light empirical material one won’t find elsewhere and draws on it to make broader theoretical claims about how sovereignty, borders, and law have come to operate in the present.

In his review, Mancina’s questions focus on the nature of the maritime migration “border” the United States has externalized into the Caribbean—what I call a “pointillist” maritime migration border. A “pointillist” border, as the name suggests, consists of points of encounter between sovereign policing power and the policed that look an awful lot like the interactions we often imagine as occurring at a nation-state’s juridically-defined territorial border lines or within its interiors. With the pointillist maritime border, though, these confrontations emerge on a different physical and legal terrain than that of the territorial border. Pointillism as a concept is meant to help us think about what we mean when we use a phrase like “border externalization” to describe a “border” that has been pushed out into the “in-between” spaces—in-between from the perspective of nation-state sovereignty—of the sea and that no longer takes the form of a fixed line.

The final full chapter of the book charts how a complex legal topography of territorial seas, bilateral agreements, and administrative law structures U.S. maritime migration policing. The treaty-defined status of groups and vessels in combination with a zonal terrain of territorial seas, international waters, and even less-formal patrol “polygons,” come together to set the parameters for what U.S. migration patrols are able to do in Caribbean waters. Recognizing the difference between the pointillist eruptions of sovereign power in these aqueous spaces and the traditionally-imagined border line of firm land is, I argue, crucial for understanding what kind of an entity the nation-state is in its current manifestations.

Mancina worries, though, that I may have made the mistake of “fetish[izing] . . . the essence of the territorial border as existing in potentially all ‘bordering acts’ of the state.” The implication seems to be that my analysis is mystifying what’s happening with maritime interdiction in some way that makes territorial borders seem “natural” rather than socioculturally constructed. Mancina’s concern rests on the idea that I see the “pointillist” maritime migration border as a mere “copy” of the territorial border, rather than a separate “species” within a common “genus,” to invoke the phylogenetic metaphor he uses.

I appreciate Mancina’s attentiveness to the dangers of making certain aspects of the nation-state form appear as if they are merely “natural,” homogeneous, and inevitable features of the landscapes we inhabit. A similar impulse to de-fetishize the nation-state form animates much of Islands. The book, after all, is an exercise in what I call a “legal anthropology of the technical” that is designed to reveal often-ignored juridical intricacies and to develop theoretical tools to help us discern and grapple with their effects.

A concept like the “pointillist border,” for instance, is meant to illuminate how legal infrastructures, policing practices, and spatial imaginaries come together to remake the form of the nation-state, not by simply multiplying or “copy[ing]” the “essence” of what was already there, but by spinning out new, yet still related, bordering techniques and jurisdictional paradigms. As I have tried to show throughout the book, a sociolegal approach that is unafraid of the technical dimensions of law, however tedious their complexity may appear, while also remaining attuned to theoretical insights beyond the particularities of narrowly circumscribed places and times is a delicate balance to maintain but, and I think Mancina would agree, also a necessity. I leave it to readers to determine whether Islands has achieved that balance in ways that are useful for understanding the deeply troubling innovations in border securitization that continue to emerge at the thresholds of the global North.