Private Sovereignties: ZEDEs, Puertopias, and Seasteads in Central America and the Caribbean: A Panel

A Latin American and Caribbean Studies Program Public Issues Forum Panel.

About the Panelists and the Moderator:

Beth Geglia is a public anthropologist focused on processes of privatization in urban and rural settings, tech capitalism, and social movements. Her research examines the development of Economic Development and Employment Zones (ZEDEs) in Honduras and how global visions for private “startup cities” and ideologies of the decentralized finance movement interact with different political projects, land disputes, and territorial realities in Honduras. Beth holds a PhD in Anthropology from American University, and is currently working on a book manuscript as a Hunt Postdoctoral Fellow with the Wenner-Gren Foundation.

Atossa Araxia Abrahamian is a journalist who writes about the unexpected aspects of globalization. Her first book, The Cosmopolites, investigated the global market for citizenship, revealing how the sale of second and third passports to the ultrarich intersects with growing wealth inequality and a crisis of statelessness. She is working on The Hidden Globe, a non-fiction book about unusual and extraterritorial jurisdictions from art freeports to outer space. Atossa is a recipient of the 2022 Whiting Creative Nonfiction grant and a 2021 Silvers grant for works-in-progress. She lives in Brooklyn with her family.

Rafael Cox Alomar is a professor of law at the David A. Clarke School of Law of the University of the District of Columbia in Washington, D.C., and has been a Visiting Professor of Law at Harvard Law School (Winter 2022). He is the author of The Puerto Rico Constitution (Oxford University Press 2022) and Revisiting the Transatlantic Triangle: The Constitutional Decolonization of the Eastern Caribbean (Ian Randle 2009). Professor Cox Alomar received a BA magna cum laude from Cornell University; a DPhil in history from the University of Oxford (Trinity College), where he was a Marshall Scholar; and a JD from Harvard Law School.

Moderator: Ray Craib is Marie Underhill Noll Professor of History at Cornell and the author, most recently, of Adventure Capitalism: A history of libertarian exit, from the era of decolonization to the digital age (PM Press/Spectre, 2022).