Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti Author: Jake Johnston

Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti Author: Jake Johnston Year: 2023 Publisher: St. Martin's Press, New York Type: Investigative nonfiction / political analysis Central Argument Johnston argues that Haiti is best understood not as a "failed state" but as an "Aid State" — a polity whose public institutions have been systematically hollowed out and replaced by a parallel apparatus of international donors, NGOs, multilateral banks, and development contractors. Tracing more than a decade of US policy from the 2010 earthquake through the 2021 assassination of President Jovenel Moïse and the second major earthquake that same year, he shows that the humanitarian and reconstruction response was shaped primarily by elite panic, migration deterrence, and the strategic interests of donor nations rather than the expressed needs of Haitians.