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Anthropologist Wins Law and Society Award

Book cover and Jeffrey S. Kahn mugshot
  • Islands of Sovereignty: Haitian Migration and the Borders of Empire
  • By Jeffrey S. Kahn, assistant professor, Department of Anthropology

鈥淣o one concerned about the frightening history of the country鈥檚 relationship to others at another troubling moment 鈥 and no one who cares about the discretionary sovereignty of the modern state and its borders 鈥 can afford to look away from the story Kahn tells in this major intervention.鈥 鈥 Samuel Moyn, Yale Law School, author of 鈥淣ot Enough: Human Rights in an Unequal World鈥


Jeffrey Kahn鈥檚 book about Haitian boat migration to the United States is the winner of a 2020 Herbert Jacob Book Prize from the Law and Society Association.

Islands of Sovereignty examines how Haitian asylum seekers during the last three decades of the 20th century led to the development of new forms of legal activism, border governance and oceanic policing that have remade the spatiality of the American nation-state.

A sociocultural anthropologist and a legal scholar, Kahn combined ethnography with archival research in writing Islands of Sovereignty.

The recognizes new, outstanding work in law and society scholarship. One award committee member described Kahn鈥檚 ethnography as 鈥渂reathtaking.鈥

Islands of Sovereignty, Kahn鈥檚 first book, also won a .

Kathleen Holder is a content strategist and writer in the College of Letters and Science.

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