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Truth commissions were created to investigate human rights violations as a result of political negotiations in both El Salvador and Haiti. The commissions included in their reports recommendations designed to secure reparations for the victims. However, despite the gravity of the events and the formal commitment of the governments, neither El Salvador nor Haiti has implemented these recommendations. Two case studies provide an opportunity to examine the economic, social, and political factors that explain non-compliance with truth-commission recommendations on reparations. This paper examines the experiences of El Salvador and Haiti, and presents some conclusions and lessons learned. The first and most important conclusion is that in order to ensure that reparations programs will be put into practice, a correlation of political forces that favors such programs is necessary. The construction of such a correlation depends on the existence of sufficiently powerful and influential players to promote and defend it.

During the 1990s, modesty in expectations remained the leitmotif of international humanitarian operations in places like Cambodia, Haiti, and East Timor. In Cambodia, human rights violations littered much of the recent past and remain a continuing problem. Following Operation Uphold Democracy in Haiti, a 1995 lessons‐learned report noted that there is no US government doctrine integrating the military component of a complex humanitarian operation with the civilian agencies responsible for recovery. As for East Timor, while quite limited as a policy precedent, it will probably be considered the paradigmatic test case for international state building.

Refugee policy needs to be more proactive, and a greater degree of international cooperation and a preventive orientation should animate humanitarian responses.

This chapter examines the multilateral 1994 Haiti intervention, an unlikely case of multilateralism for both the operational commitment and regional power explanations. The vast power disparities between the US and Haitian militaries and the absence of regional powers should have meant an interest in minimal multilateralism; the UN-authorized intervention and allied support challenge these explanations.

This chapter presents a set of indicative case studies that illustrate the consequences of the two forms of semi-presidentialism. For both, evidence from cases that appear to confirm the hypothesized dynamics of each type of semi-presidentialism is presented first. Then, a number of apparently confounding cases are presented. The chapter begins by examining the dynamics of president-parliamentarism in Russia, Taiwan, Austria, Iceland, and Namibia. The chapter then moves on to an examination of premier-presidentialism in Poland, Congo-Brazzaville, Niger, and Haiti.

During the American Revolution and in the early national years, republican ideology was claimed by both the supporters and the critics of American slavery. For some, black men seemed to lack the civic virtue necessary to defend liberty, while the African American population at large undermined the political security of the USA insofar as conflicts between the majority white population and the minority black population seemed inevitable. The solution favored by leading republicans such as Thomas Jefferson and James Madison was colonization, the expatriation of African Americans to Africa. Sierra Leone and Liberia were settled by black people sent from North America; some migrated to Haiti. For others, like Lemuel Haynes, black men had already demonstrated their civic virtue by supporting the patriot cause in the Revolution as well as by participating in the economic and religious life of the U.S. He countered colonizationist thought with arguments for the integration of blacks and whites in the republic.

This chapter explores ecclesiastical politics in the Diocese of Louisiana and the Floridas in the early nineteenth century. Faced with a large population of slaves and free people of color, French missionary conceptions of Catholicism collided with centuries-old local religious customs and traditions in New Orleans, causing romantic notions of the missionary life to vanish. By scrutinizing the intricacies of ecclesiastical politics in Louisiana, the chapter examines how missionary perceptions of Catholic New Orleans contrasted with the realities of life a world away from the confined corridors of French seminaries and the elite gatherings of the Sacred Congregation de Propaganda Fide in Rome.

Revolution in France and Saint-Domingue, coupled with the creation of an independent Haiti in 1804, put in jeopardy the work that Catholic missionaries had done over the course of the eighteenth century. This chapter explores how French missionaries reorganized their hierarchy and reasserted their place within Haitian society over the course of the nineteenth century. In particular, it considers how French missionaries, primarily from Brittany, evangelized in late nineteenth-century Haiti, often facing great tension and conflict with civil authorities, as well as practitioners of Voodoo.

This essay explores the contemporary legacies of colonial religious discourses, by examining how participants in Haiti’s annual Rara festival—a Lenten carnival and public performance of Haitian Vodou—at once inherit and transform the anti-Jewish sentiments of the clergy in colonial Saint Domingue. Through an active identification with the Jews who “killed Jesus,” disenfranchised Haitians reinvent the European demonization of Jews and Africans, deconstructing colonial religious categories from within, in order to craft rituals of resistance to their country’s predominantly Catholic and mulatto elites.

This article examines the nineteenth century Haitian state’s penal prohibition of “le vaudoux” as a form of “sortilege” or spell. It studies how, in the face of unremitting white Western hostility and racist malign, successive post-revolutionary Haitian governments relied on juridical law both as a sign of political modernity and as a space for the repudiation of the so-called primitive in Haiti. The article focuses on two significant episodes of enforcement of these laws following the return of the Roman Catholic Church to Haiti in 1860. At this point, popular ritual practice fell, in effect, under a second punitive regime, even as the newly arrived foreign clergy also pressed the Haitian state for stricter enforcement of the laws already in place. I argue, however, that the application of what were frequently consolidated after 1860 as “les lois divines et humaines” against “le vaudoux” proved, repeatedly, to be impossible for both state and Church. The disparity between how this word was constructed through penal and ecclesiastical laws versus how it was popularly understood became the key point on which both the state’s and the Church’s campaigns against popular ritual invariably foundered.

Despite some common features, each war-to-peace transition is distinct, owing to the specific interplay of a number of factors. These include the circumstances in which conflict or chaos began — for example, internal strife, regional conflict, ethnic rivalries, or control over natural resources — and whether peace was reached through negotiation or through military intervention. Other factors include the extent of international financial and technical assistance, and the number of international troops and police that the country could obtain, given its strategic or regional importance vis-à-vis donors and troop-contributors. This chapter also analyzes the move from the military-civilian UN-led operations in the 1990s — Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador, Mozambique, Guatemala, and Haiti — to the mid-1990s when human tragedies in Rwanda, Bosnia, and Kosovo led to military interventions with UN support. Following September 11, the United States led military interventions in Afghanistan and Iraq, with the UN's role clearly diminishing and becoming secondary.

News from Haiti has seldom been positive for the past four decades and it has always had bad press coverage. Though some errors have been corrected, the Haitian case is still considered as an emergency in human or humanitarian terms. Though Haiti does not technically meet the specifications of a humanitarian emergency, since the death count is not extensive and civil war in Haiti did not develop into whole-scale violence, its situation regarding the per capita income, nutrition, health, and refugee flows has been crucial enough to consider it as an emergency case. Haiti can thus be considered as a ‘potential’ rather than actual emergency. The decline of the living standards in the country have made the scenario even worse. This chapter presents the main causes of emergency conditions in Haiti. Economic factors are discussed, followed by the interaction between politics and economics. The chapter also identifies long-standing Haitian conflicts, and reveals Haiti's obstacles to economic development and recent changes in politics.

Examines the three-volume novel Zelica; the Creole (1820), most often attributed to Leonora Sansay. The author argues that Zelica ambivalently constructs a narrative in which during the Revolution, women of color become the principle guardians of “white” women, whom they protect from both men of color and male European colonists. In addition, the novel provokes questions about the nature of a gendered revolution that often made no room for benevolence and kindness as a form of rebellion against authority.