Who Owns Haiti? People, Power, and Sovereignty ed. by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman (review)

Inspired by the symposium "Who Owns Haiti? Sovereignty in a Fragile State, 2004–2014," held in Washington, DC, in May 2014, this volume gives an excellent overview of the myriad actors challenging and undermining the independence and sovereignty of the Haitian nation, past and present. In a total of ten contributions, the authors uncover the contestations to Haitian sovereignty running a throughline in the country's history. The essays analyze recurrent aid interventions in a country home to the first postwar development project, far-reaching economic structural adjustment programs, and foreign military occupations, all but facilitated by the elite of a predatory Haitian republic capitalizing on the oppression of the majority of the population.¹

Edited by Robert Maguire and Scott Freeman, Who Owns Haiti? is a timely contribution to a series of contemporary examinations on sovereignty in the context of Caribbean emancipation, including Yarimar Bonilla's Non-sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015) and Karen Salt's Unfinished Revolution: Haiti, Black Sovereignty and Power in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (2019). Its chapters revolve around a notion of sovereignty that goes beyond purely legalistic definitions of a nation in control of its borders and its monopoly on violence to include such concepts as selfhood, agency, justice, and ownership. The volume at hand proves this approach particularly useful in examining the complexities of contested sovereignties.

Assembling authors from a variety of disciplines such as history, anthropology, political sciences, economics, and development studies, Who Owns Haiti? includes a plurality of scholarly perspectives examining the relationalities of Haiti to the world.

Historian Laurent Dubois, for example, elaborates on Jean Casimir's concept of the counter-plantation as "a system of engagement that is based on an absolute commitment to maintaining autonomy and dignity" (26), deriving from vivid memories of the colonial atrocities symbolized by the plantation system. Robert Fatton Jr. then uses the world-system approach to describe Haiti as situated at the "outer periphery," subjected to international tutelage and trusteeship, especially with regard to the many aid interventions the country has been forced to succumb to in the past seventy years. In a similar vein, Robert Maguire analyzes US aid to Haiti during the past decade, focusing on post-2010 earthquake funds, and ends with the grim yet not necessarily unexpected conclusion that the "vast majority of aid ultimately remains in control of non-Haitian entities" (99).

Political scientist François Pierre-Louis Jr. offers a take on the role of the Haitian elite, especially in electoral processes, attesting to their lack of will to "govern the country in the interest of and to the benefit of all" (63). The chapter also explores the unfortunate role that the United States, the Organization of American States (OAS), and the United Nations stabilization mission to Haiti, MINUSTAH, have played, particularly in the rise to power of former Haitian president Michel Martelly. Pierre-Louis's contribution also sheds light on the current political crisis in Haiti.

Ricardo Seitenfus, the former OAS representative in Haiti, analyses the Brazilian contribution to the UN mission MINUSTAH. The mission to Haiti marked not only a turn from peacekeeping toward stabilization but also a regional turn in UN engagement. The majority of boots on the ground came from Latin American countries. Seitenfus's article depicts Brazil's foreign-policy evolution from "non-interference" to a thirteen-yearlong intense engagement with UN intervention. Throughout the mission, Brazil provided not only the Force Commander but also the largest contingents. The article further shows how "Haiti became a preferential client of the UN Security Council" (82).

Who Owns Haiti? concludes with three anthropological contributions. Karen Richman's essay historically analyzes the religious field in Haiti, critically engaging the contested spiritual landscape after Douz Janvye. Scott Freeman and Chelsey Kivland then take a deep dive into ethnographic descriptions of Haitian acts of resisting and appropriating (un)deliberate attempts to undermine...