Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic as documented in extant scholarship.3 Chapters 3 and 5, by contrast, make important original contributions to the literature. The former links international organisation support and efforts to ‘include the “excluded”’ with the administrative (re)ordering of Dominicans, while the latter amplifies the voices of those who have been affected by this reordering. Hayes de Kalaf argues that the World Bank’s involvement in promoting legal identity exacerbated historical tensions over the right to Dominican nationality for people of Haitian descent born in the country, many of whom already held documents proving their Dominican citizenship. During the early 2000s, international financial institutions, led by the World Bank, were pushing narrowly targeted poverty reduction and social safety net measures to mitigate the effects of unbridled capitalism.4 At the same time, addressing under-registration was emerging as a development concern especially for Afro-descended, Indigenous and other marginalised groups.5 For the rural poor to be targeted by social protection programs, first they had to be registered and documented. Women were particularly targeted for inclusion in Conditional Cash Transfer programs, which meant documentation for women took on greater importance. Unfortunately, not only did these renewed efforts do little to encourage Government bureaucrats to address the historical exclusion of people of Haitian descent; they also bolstered state architectures and technologies to block them from accessing the legal identity documentation many had already acquired as Dominican citizens. 6 The critical lens on development that Hayes de Kalaf brings is timely and useful. First, it is timely as we collectively work to understand the impacts of COVID-19 on those rendered stateless. 7 Indeed, when the Caribbean Migrants Observatory conducted research among people of Haitian descent in 2020, the effects of the targeted social exclusion Hayes de Kalaf describes were sorely felt among those who had been stripped of their citizenship and made ineligible for emergency social assistance during the pandemic.8 The United Nations predicts 3 4 5 6 7 8 Kristy A Belton, Statelessness in the Caribbean: The Paradox of Belonging in a Postnational World (University of Pennsylvania Press 2017) 86; Trenita Brookshire Childers, In Someone Else’s Country: Anti-Haitian Racism and Citizenship in the Dominican Republic (Rowman & Littlefield 2021); Bridget Wooding, Haitian Immigrants and Their Descendants Born in the Dominican Republic (Oxford University Press 2018); Samuel Martínez, ‘The Price of Confrontation: International Retributive Justice and the Struggle for Haitian-Dominican Rights’ in George Andreopoulos and Zehra Arat (eds), The Uses and Misuses of Human Rights: A Critical Approach to Advocacy (Palgrave 2014); April J Mayes, ‘Ties That Bind: La Sentencia and Citizenship in Contemporary Hispaniola’ in April J Mayes and Kiran Jayaram (eds), Transnational Hispaniola: New Directions in Haitian and Dominican Studies (University of Florida Press 2018) 201, 208; David C Baluarte, ‘The Perpetuation of Childhood Statelessness in the Dominican Republic’, The World’s Stateless Children (Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion, Wolf Legal Publishers 2017) 434. Daniel Béland and Rianne Mahon, Advanced Introduction to Social Policy (Edward Elgar Publishing 2016). Hayes de Kalaf (n 1) 33. ibid 49. COVID-19 Emergency Statelessness Fund (CESF), ‘Together We Can: The COVID-19 Impact on Stateless People & a Roadmap for Change’ (Institute on Statelessness and Inclusion 2021) <https://www.institutesi.org/pages/covid19_and_statelessness>; see also the SCR Symposium section edited by Jamie Liew, ‘Statelessness and COVID-19’ (2021) 3(1) Statelessness & Citizenship Review 120. Bridget Wooding and Allison J Petrozziello, Research Brief: COVID-19 Impacts on Haitian Migrants and Their Descendants on the Southern Border of the Dominican Republic (Caribbean Migrants Observatory (OBMICA); Editora Buho 2021) <http://obmica.org/images/Resumen_investigacion_RD_COVID_JUN_2021compressed.pdf>. 367