Dr. Atiles book Crisis by Design (Stanford, 2024) offers an interdisciplinary sociolegal analysis of the role of law, emergency powers, and anticorruption mobilizations in Puerto Rico’s ongoing multilayered crisis. From the 2006 public debt crisis and the government’s bankruptcy in 2016 to the devastation of Hurricanes Irma, María, and Fiona, the 2020 earthquakes, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the anticorruption uprisings of 2019, Puerto Rico’s recent history has been shaped by overlapping crises that have deepened inequality and citizen vulnerability. Rather than viewing these crises as isolated events, this talk argues that they are integral to the legal structure of colonialism, which actively produces and sustains disaster conditions.
Drawing on eight years of qualitative research—including ethnography, semi-structured interviews, archival analysis, and policy review—Crisis by Design examines the legal and political mechanisms that manufacture and manage crisis in Puerto Rico. The book introduces three key concepts: the colonial state of exception, which frames US colonialism as a permanent legal structure of inclusion/exclusion; colonial legality, which captures the legal practices, policies, and economic frameworks sustaining Puerto Rico’s crisis management; and legal interruptions, which describes civil society efforts to mobilize transparency laws and accountability measures as a form of resistance. These mobilizations together with grassroots demonstrations, or what I term colonial ruptures, challenge the repetitive temporality of colonial legality, underscoring a radical possibility for rendering the colonial legal structure in Puerto Rico ineffective.
By critically engaging with law, power, and resistance in Puerto Rico, Crisis by Design contributes to global debates on colonialism, legal governance, and crisis management in the Global South.