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This chapter examines how corporations and contractors, lobbyists, and consultants have exploited the Haitian crisis for their personal gain by leveraging humanitarian aid for profit. Plenty of the $1.1 billion in disaster relief from the United States has gone to inside-the-Beltway contractors rather than to suffering Haitians. In the first year, the U.S. government awarded more than 1,500 contracts worth $267 million, most of which went to U.S. firms and the rest to Haitian businesses. One contractor called it “the Super Bowl of disasters.” This chapter looks at a few examples of post-earthquake contracts and grants to illustrate that disaster capitalism is at work in Haiti after the earthquake, such as the story of housing and nonprofit CHF International's cash-for-work programs. It also considers the role of U.S. firms in the privatization of governance in Haiti.

This chapter offers a staggering critique of post-earthquake development plans in Haiti. In the wake of the Haitian earthquake, Haiti became an example of disaster capitalism in action. Kiran Jayaram argues that the idea of sustainability, as in new plans for mango production, has been co-opted, becoming code for the continuation of exploitative economic policies within the political economy.

This book offers an account of the first year after the Haitian earthquake of 2010, focusing on the deep fault lines caused by the disaster on the society, economy, and polity. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of Haitians, it examines the alternative principles and practices that the grassroots have tried to establish over time. It looks at the commitment to community and sharing, what Haitians call solidarity, and considers how the old practices went into overdrive after the disaster. It discusses the search-and-rescue operations, led by common citizens instead of foreign soldiers with German shepherds. It recounts the experiences of first responders and describes the citizen relief efforts that filled the enormous gap between foreign donations and the urgent needs of survivors. It also explores the agenda and endeavors of social movements in contrast to the disaster capitalism that has run rampant in Haiti. The stories told in this book are ultimately about hope.

The introduction of this book frames the transition from state socialism to market capitalism that began in Eastern Europe and Central Asia in 1989 as a story of “winners” and “losers.” Ghodsee and Orenstein grapple with the different viewpoints held by scholars and policymakers, some of whom view transition as a qualified success, and some who view it as a socioeconomic catastrophe. Ghodsee and Orenstein introduce the interdisciplinary approach that the book will take, touching upon research methodology in economics, demography, public opinion, and ethnography. The introduction also provides an account of changes in academic and institutional discourse over time, explaining the initial perspectives of transition and showing where theories were proven correct, and where they failed, over the course of the thirty-year transition. It proposes a new perspective to understand transition, one of extreme social and economic inequality, that captures the experiences of both the “winners” and the “losers” of transition.

This chapter defends politics against crises. It argues that the crisis of politics (the erosion of public support for politics and politicians) reflects the politics of crisis (the use of crisis-inflation strategies in order to scare the public into behaving in a specific way). It suggests that we have lost our capacity to discriminate between social pathology or breakdown, on the one side, and social normality and social order on the other. The chapter focuses on four main themes: the notion of liquidity; the changing nature of risk; climate change and the ‘authoritarian alternative’; and the theme of collective confidence. These issues conspire to produce a form of ‘disaster capitalism’ in which threats, disasters, catastrophes, and crises are at one and the same time everywhere and nowhere.

In this chapter the world-historic transfer of public monies into private hands that occurred during the War on Terror is discussed in relation to sovereign masculinity. Naomi Klein’s view of “disaster capitalism” as aggressive exploitation of catastrophe is discussed. Gender is an “apparatus” in the Althusserian sense, the author argues, which organizes the transfer of wealth after events such as 9/11 and the “Shock and Awe” Iraq invasion, against the material interests of the people by mobilizing our gendered sense of existence against our material interests.

Greg Beckett locates the hub of the discourse rotating along a Western axis of shock and pain that unendingly constructs Haiti as delinquent. His research examines institutional roles in reproducing difference. Appropriately, Beckett asks: “Is it possible to speak of Haiti without speaking of crisis?” and “what do we really mean by crisis, and what do we mean by crisis in Haiti?”

Karen Richman’s work centers religion and faith in post-earthquake Haiti and establishes that in spite of “speculative claims” about vodou’s impact upon the nation and the experiences of Haitians during this complex and arduous time, there remains a void in empirical scholarship regarding the “religious implications” of Haiti’s monumental seismic event. In what ways and to what extent have Haitian people’s faith shifted due to the tremors on January 12^th and the subsequent days after? What can we learn historically, culturally, and politically about specific communities and their relationship to the state, civil society and international organizations through a religious context?

In an effort to bridge the local and state deliberations scholar Harley Etienne pushes academics and national and international leaders within the world of politics and social service to take seriously the “discipline and practice” of urban planning. Urban planners are critical components to the recovery effort because they “coordinate land use, design policy to achieve long-term goals of urban growth, regeneration and economic development.” Etienne asserts that the relationship between the country’s formal institutions (i.e. legal and educational systems) and Haiti’s “social organization [and] capacity for social service provision” are relegated to secondary or tertiary roles in national planning strategies. Hence, in an effort push the boundaries of the field Etienne emphasizes that a broad, interdisciplinary spectrum of professionals—from law and social work to civil engineers to public policy advocates—engage in a comprehensive and unified dialogue to produce durable urban and rural regeneration and offset popular pressures to “rush” the rebuilding process.

Lastly, the enlightening conversation between four leading scholars on Haiti, Alex Dupuy, Tatiana Wah, Robert Fatton, Jr. and Èvelyne Trouillot explicates Haiti’s relationship with the international community and critiques the virtual trusteeship of Haiti by foreign governments. These thinkers of Haitian affairs help to anchor the volume’s themes, which include discussion of sovereignty, economic and cultural development, citizenship, urban planning, Haitian history and disaster capitalism.

Nick Nesbitt identifies and engages the notion of difference and deviance in Haitian history and its connections to international relations. The author locates the discourse rotating along a Western axis of shock and pain that unendingly constructs Haiti as delinquent through his study of U.S./Haiti.

Patrick Sylvain’s chapter impels the reader to ask: What are the ways Haitian leadership create openings for or replicate discourses and systems that make the nation susceptible to harm? Given the media and popular criticism from Haitian citizens against former Haitian president René Préval’s muted and deficient leadership in the aftermath of the earthquake what perceptions are reinscribed or “structural vulnerabilit[ies]” revealed between state and nation?

Similarly, anthropologist Mark Schuller examines social health risks in urban neighborhoods, specifically cholera, in which these health threats were amplified by measures taken by NGOs. Interestingly, the discussion about the origins of the cholera outbreak, where more than 300,000 people have been affected and 5,000 have died, dominate news desks and encourages the reader to think about the circulation of disparaging ideas about Haiti when foreign relationships are renewed in the wake of this tragedy.

The work of Wien Weibert Arthus demonstrates the complexity of desire when nations attempted to mold themselves to U.S. foreign policy strategies. An anticommunist Haiti proved to be insufficient to the Kennedy administration and the billions promised to Latin American and Caribbean governments for development projects and societal improvements. Authoritarian leadership, weak infrastructure and the hurdles to reconcile nationalistic pride and “international assistance” illuminate the intricacies of sovereignty and the machine of global aid programs—struggles that continue to this day and help us unpack the current issues in tent camps and other sites hard hit by the earthquake, and also policy and financial matters at the executive and local level where non-governmental and international organizations tend to dominate.

Elizabeth McAlister’s chapter provides a much-needed lineage and analysis of the ideology and practice of Haitian and American Christian evangelicals who, in response to a burgeoning acceptance of vodou under Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s administration, believed that Haiti’s political, economic and social troubles could be ameliorated through a rededication to Christian values and the “transforming power” of Jesus Christ. McAlister demonstrates that this commitment to Christ and Christian traditions by evangelicals and Protestants, who some scholars estimate that they consist of a third of the Haitian citizenry, is influenced by colonial events, specifically the religious sacrifice of a pig by vodou practitioners at the beginning of the Haitian Revolution. Thus, the work of religion and ritual in the years before and after the earthquake, according to McAlister, works to “re-narrate Haitian history.” Additionally, the Christian evangelical movement reasserts the centrality of Jesus Christ in the spiritual, political, and historical space of Haiti—in effect suppressing non-Christian practices—and therefore “recast[ing] Haitian civil religion.”

Scholar Sibylle Fischer analyzes representations of this crisis through the Haitian body and astutely challenges readers and those who claim to act or speak for those who suffer must watch their “complicity” in physical, structural, or symbolic violence. And, in turn, they must aim to actively engage in an “historical, philosophical or representation contextualization” in order to oppose one’s collusion in aggressive exploits.