Legal Identity, Race and Belonging in the Dominican Republic this work by examining how states actively engaged in social exclusion learn from one another. Just as good policy ideas travel fast, so too do the bad ones. Conditional Cash Transfer programs are a perfect example of a policy idea that originated in Latin America and travelled quickly as part of what Jamie Peck and Nik Theodore call ‘experimental statecraft at the threshold of neoliberalism’.15 Critical interdisciplinary research like Hayes de Kalaf, Peck and Theodore’s holds much promise for problematising fast policy (time-compressed, external actordriven policymaking) by looking at the institutions, social and political practices and other conditions involved in identity and social policy formation, transfer and mutation. The challenge this collective of thinkers may wish to take up is to investigate whether and how states are sharing ideas about how to systematically exclude marginalised groups they do not wish to incorporate. Legal Identity contributes to scholarship on statelessness and citizenship by shining light on the citizenship-stripping practices which continue to affect oncedocumented Dominican citizens of Haitian descent. The critical examination of ‘foreign making practices’ in Chapter 5, ‘Dominican or not Dominican? Citizens and their Experiences of Legal Identity Measures’, is fascinating. Those affected by these practices have many faces, Haitian descendant and not. These practices include miscategorisation, citizens’ confused misapplication, indefinite deferral of decision and administrative cancellation of documents when attempting another transaction, such as birth registration of a newborn. While Kristy Belton’s book Statelessness in the Caribbean is not cited,16 Hayes de Kalaf’s book provides a complementary study. Whereas Belton focuses on the non-legal means through which the Dominican State creates statelessness (bureaucratic practice, discrimination, and negligence), Hayes de Kalaf brings to the fore the lived experiences of those seeking to (re)obtain proof of their legal identity and contrasts these lived realities with the development sector’s unwitting perpetuation of such exclusions. One line of argument that I found somewhat confounding is Hayes de Kalaf’s call to ‘dehaitianise’ approaches to the Dominican case and the controversial Constitutional Court sentence 168–13.17 This, she writes, is a deliberately provocative move in order to reframe the issue from a migration problem to one of the state using its architectures to redefine citizenship. 18 This comes across as incompatible with other claims which directly recognise anti-Haitianism as a motivating factor for State actions, as laid out in Chapter 2 ‘Permanently Foreign: Haitian-Descended Populations in the DR’. While the examples discussed in Chapter 5 do demonstrate that the practices of citizenship-stripping have affected others who are not of Haitian ancestry (eg, Black Dominicans of Anglo-Caribbean descent, children of Japanese and Argentinean parents), it is also true that every single one of those cases was eventually resolved, while those of Haitian ancestry were not. Activists and scholars have been insisting that this is not a migration issue for some time, not least through their constant insistence at distinguishing 15 16 17 18 Jamie Peck and Nikolas Theodore, Fast Policy: Experimental Statecraft at the Thresholds of Neoliberalism (University of Minnesota Press 2015). Belton (n 3). Hayes de Kalaf (n 1) 28. ibid 45. 369