Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti Author: Erica Caple James

Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti Author: Erica Caple James Year: 2010 Publisher: University of California Press (California Series in Public Anthropology) ISBN: 978-0-520-26053-5 (cloth); 978-0-520-26054-2 (pbk.) Series editors: Robert Borofsky; contributing editors include Paul Farmer, Philippe Bourgois Central Argument James argues that international military and humanitarian interventions in Haiti following the 1991–94 coup — despite their stated aims of democracy promotion and victim rehabilitation — paradoxically reinforced the very conditions of predation, corruption, and insecurity they were meant to remedy. Her central analytical concept is ensekirite (Haitian Creole for insecurity): not merely physical danger but an embodied, sensory state of vulnerability and anxiety generated by political violence, criminal violence, economic instability, environmental precarity, and spiritual rupture. Through ethnographic research conducted between 1995 and 20 in Port-au-Prince, James traces how the coup regime's terror apparatus targeted pro-democracy activists with sexual and gender violence rooted in plantation-era disciplinary practices; how a massive aid apparatus then generated a "political economy of trauma" that commodified suffering; and how competition over humanitarian resources within the NGO/government ecosystem reproduced forms of insecurity from within.