Crisis by Design makes a compelling and important argument detailing how, as an imperial power, the US has engineered, institutionalized, and delivered the sustained discounting of Puerto Rican lives. Analyzing how disaster management, financialization, and colonial legalities have conditioned strategic reconfigurations of governance and capital accumulation, Atiles unpacks the complexities of crisis to reveal the racialized, profit-motivated, legally sanctioned processes at work.

Of particular salience to sociolegal scholars is the enmeshment of law, US colonialism, and crises. The state of exception, he shows, is structure rather than event, a “constitutive dimension” in both the formation of Puerto Rico and in the management of its contemporary crises (8). Focusing on the roles played by law, exceptionality, and crises, Atiles shines a light on how natural disasters have catastrophic effects when twinned to the plunder of imperial wealth extraction and the permanent state of exception of colonial legality.

Tracing the history of colonial legality shaping Puerto Rico through case law, (notably, the infamous double-speak of the Insular Cases of the early 1900s) and legislation enacted by the US Congress and imposed on Puerto Rico (from the 1900 Foraker Act onwards), Atiles illuminates troubling continuities between these foundational laws inscribing “racialized discourses of corruption and moral decadence” while precluding Puerto Ricans from self-determination (30), and the contemporary deployment of executive orders and emergency powers (Chapter One). Chapter Two applies Atiles’s concept of colonial legalities, showing how the extractive inequities of colonialism morphed into the public-debt fostering financialization of the contemporary economy. Growing debt, stagnation, and speculative finances while shrinking public goods and welfare, these economic, political, and legal features were primarily designed by US congressional legislation. Colonialism, he writes, is “an ongoing catastrophe” (96).

Informed by critical criminology and sociolegal studies, Chapter Three offers an analysis of colonial state-corporate crimes, and the structure of impunity protecting these powerful actors, in the public debt, bankruptcy, and restructuring processes that impoverished ordinary people while enriching elites. Chapter Four turns to a series of disasters – three hurricanes and an earthquake – to show how emergency powers were deployed to effect the neglect of citizens even as recovery funds were channeled to militarized and privatized corporate actors. Chapter Five turns to a disaster of another kind: the COVID-19 pandemic. Focusing on how the pandemic created new spaces for wealth extraction in tandem with citizen neglect, Atiles details the pharmaceutical industry’s tax avoidance, and the manner in which Puerto Rico was excluded from receiving personal protection equipment. These pro-corporation moves took place alongside erosions of Puerto Rican internal democracy. Atiles shows how colonial legality, as structure, facilitates corporate tax avoidance, corruption, and the violation of human rights. Anticorruption interventions, he shows, were deployed “to control, discipline, and punish the most vulnerable populations, rather than using these powers to prevent the contagion and guarantee the well-being of the population” (191).

Against this bleak landscape of how law has facilitated colonial extraction, past and present, Chapter Six offers one of this book’s most inspiring and optimistic moments. Theorizing legal interruptions as the sociolegal effect of civil society’s turn to law to demand transparency, accountability, and access to information, this chapter demonstrates how lawyers, journalists, and civil society activists have engaged in legal mobilizations to interrupt colonial legality. This note of hope and faith in the power of transformation also marks the book’s Epilogue, which celebrates the protests and demonstrations of Puerto Ricans demanding a radical transformation of the colonial relationship.

In addition to insightful engagement with key literatures on colonialism, the state of exception, and scholarship on Puerto Rico, Crisis by Design in informed by eight years of qualitative research on law and emergency powers in Puerto Rico. In addition to a rigorous conceptualization of colonial legality, a major scholarly contribution of this book is to draw attention to the legal technology of executive orders. Executive orders have become central to everyday governance in Puerto Rico, playing a central role in the administration of an enormously wide range of crises, including economic and fiscal crises, disasters such as hurricanes and wildfires, public health crises like the COVID-19 pandemic, as well as states of emergency relating to infrastructure and energy, gender violence, and coastal erosion. Atiles uncovers how executive orders legitimate, facilitate, and obfuscate “uninterrupted capital accumulation” (132). He writes,

Executive orders work in tandem with other contemporary, neoliberal practices, such as deregulation and the militarization of crisis management, to enable a form of corruption grounded in colonial logics. The urgency with which Atiles writes that “the disaster is political, and the colony is the disaster” is a central message of the book. Attention to legal techniques, like executive orders, and his lucid analysis of the many threads that weave into the fabric of colonial legality, will resonate with scholars attentive to the role of race, power, violence, law, and imperialism in many spaces and times. Although the specifics Atiles delves into are Puerto Rican, the dynamics he uncovers are global and troublingly pervasive.