In November 1978, a group of Haitians sailed their small wooden vessel into the harbor of the US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay. After replenishing their stores of food and water, they departed with the blessing of the base commander and continued toward the Florida Coast in search of asylum. Far from unusual, this voyage was one of many that unfolded across an open Caribbean seascape in which Guantánamo served as a waypoint in a larger odyssey of oceanic migration. By the early 1990s, these unimpeded sea routes gave way to a virtually impenetrable wall of Coast Guard cutters while Guantánamo itself transformed into the largest US-operated migrant detention center in the world. Islands of Sovereignty is the first book to examine the history of this new maritime border and how it emerged from decades of litigation struggles over the treatment of Haitian asylum seekers in the United States. Jeffrey S. Kahn explores how a series of skirmishes in the South Florida offices of the US immigration bureaucracy became something much more—a fight for the soul of immigration policing in the United States that would eventually remake the asylum adjudication landscape on a global scale. Combining fieldwork with a wide array of historical sources, Kahn seamlessly weaves together anthropology and law in an ambitious account of liberal empire’s geographies of securitization. A novel historical ethnography of the modern legal imagination, Islands of Sovereignty offers new ways of thinking through border control in the United States and elsewhere and the political forms it continues to generate into the present.

In Islands of Sovereignty, anthropologist and legal scholar Jeffrey S. Kahn offers a new interpretation of the transformation of US borders during the late twentieth century and its implications for our understanding of the nation-state as a legal and political form. Kahn takes us on a voyage into the immigration tribunals of South Florida, the Coast Guard vessels patrolling the northern Caribbean, and the camps of Guantanamo Bay--once the world's largest US-operated migrant detention facility--to explore how litigation concerning the fate of Haitian asylum seekers gave birth to a novel paradigm of offshore oceanic migration policing. Combining ethnography--in Haiti, at Guantanamo, and alongside US migration patrols in the Caribbean--with in-depth archival research, Kahn expounds a nuanced theory of liberal empire's dynamic tensions and its racialized geographies of securitization. An innovative historical anthropology of the modern legal imagination, Islands of Sovereignty forces us to reconsider the significance of the rise of the current US immigration border and its relation to broader shifts in the legal infrastructure of contemporary nation-states across the globe.