BOOK REVIEW LEGAL IDENTITY, RACE AND BELONGING IN THE DOMINICAN REPUBLIC: FROM CITIZEN TO FOREIGNER, BY EVE HAYES DE KALAF (ANTHEM PRESS 2022) 126 PAGES. PRICE $40.00. ISBN 9781785277641 ALLISON J PETROZZIELLO* Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic: From Citizen to Foreigner (‘Legal Identity’)1 makes a timely contribution to debates on whether the development goal on legal identity for all should be interpreted as an opportunity or a threat by bringing to the fore the lived experiences of those actively being stripped of their citizenship.2 Dr Eve Hayes de Kalaf, a sociolegal scholar specialising in Latin America and the Caribbean, offers a cautionary tale for development actors who are working to promote legal identity and birth registration as part of the Sustainable Development Agenda. Where questions of racial national identity and belonging are unsettled, the development solutions being rolled out to strengthen identity documentation systems can and are being deployed in dichotomous fashion: document issuance for those a given state is willing to recognise and denial, deprivation or differential inclusion for those it is not. Based on policy analysis, archival research and interviews conducted as part of her doctoral research, Hayes de Kalaf demonstrates how this has been happening on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, which the Dominican Republic shares with Haiti. Starting in the early 2000s, financing from the World Bank and other international donors enabled the Dominican state to perpetuate its practices of arbitrary and retroactive citizenship stripping, turning Black Dominican citizens mostly of Haitian ancestry into foreigners in the country where they were born. Chapters 2 and 4 provide important context on the ways the Dominican state has engaged in legal, institutional and administrative manoeuvres to make Haitiandescended populations ‘permanently foreign’, confirming knowledge on the case * 1 2 The author is a feminist migration researcher, human rights advocate and specialist in Latin America and the Caribbean, currently pursuing a PhD in Global Governance at Wilfrid Laurier University/Balsillie School of International Affairs in Canada. She is affiliated with the International Migration Research Centre (Canada) and the Caribbean Migrants Observatory (Dominican Republic). Eve Hayes de Kalaf, Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic (Anthem Press 2022). Bronwen Manby, ‘“Legal Identity for All” and Statelessness’ (2020) 2(2) Statelessness & Citizenship Review 248; Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, ‘SDG 16.9 Legal Identity for All: Opportunity or Threat? Summary Video’, Youtube (Video, 4 December 2019) <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2x3FKWKwso>; Laura van Waas, Zahra Albarazi and Amal Chickera, Sustainable Development Goal 16.9 “Legal Identity”, Nationality and Statelessness (Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion 2018) 9 <https://files.institutesi.org/Legal-identity.pdf>.