This book offers some uncomfortable insights into the use and abuse of modern-day identity-based development ‘solutions’ for exclusionary and citizenship-stripping practices. It is the culmination of a long personal, intellectual and transformative journey that began in the Dominican Republic and has taken me around the world. Born from a desire and dedication to amplify the lived experiences of everyday Dominicans, this book includes the often overlooked, ignored or forgotten voices in contemporary debates about statelessness, citizenship, legal and, increasingly, digital identity.

This book is a cautionary tale regarding the rapid expansion of global identification measures which aim to provide universal legal identity in the run-up to the 2030 UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This study is the first to link the promulgation of contemporary ID practices by international organisations, such as the World Bank, the United Nations (UN) and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), with practices implemented by the Dominican state to arbitrarily and retroactively strip citizenship from native-born Black citizens of (largely) Haitian ancestry.

I show that while identification programmes, and the digital technologies that support them, strive to include marginalised populations, they also have the potential to exclude some ‘users’ from these systems. I use policy analysis, archival research and semi-structured interviews1 to illustrate how citizens have been forced to navigate complex bureaucratic systems and overcome seemingly unsurmountable hurdles, in order to retain or gain access to their Dominican legal identity.

The island of Hispaniola is shared between the Dominican Republic (to the east) and Haiti (to the west). For over eighty years, the Dominican Constitution recognised the right of ‘all people born on Dominican territory’ to jus soli (birthright) citizenship. For decades, however, nationalist politicians and some lawmakers ignored this constitutional guarantee and instead vehemently rejected the claims of Haitian-descended populations to Dominican citizenship. This included persons who not only already identified as Dominican citizens but also had the paperwork to prove it.

As we will see in this book, tens of thousands of persons of Haitian ancestry found themselves in a fierce battle to (re)obtain their legal identity when the authorities began to reject their requests for paperwork on the grounds that their parents were born ‘in transit’ or ‘residing illegally’. Disputes over who the state should recognise as Dominicans culminated on 23 September 2013 in the now notorious Constitutional Tribunal decision 168-13 (the Sentencia).