Killing with Kindness: Haiti, International Aid, and NGOs

An ethnographic study of how international aid operated inside contemporary Haiti, drawing on fieldwork in Léogâne during the 2004 coup and after the January 2010 earthquake, arguing that NGOs did not merely compensate for a weak Haitian state but actively reproduced that weakness by channeling money and accountability upward to donors rather than downward to communities. Schuller introduces the concepts of civic infrastructure and trickle-down imperialism to name the mechanisms behind aid-system power and connects present NGO governance to longer histories of extraction, occupation, and structural adjustment.