Peace Operations and Organized Crime: Enemies or Allies? by James Cockayne

Author:James Cockayne [Cockayne, James]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781136643071
Goodreads: 17549470
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2011-05-10T00:00:00+00:00

8 Winning Haiti’s protection competition: organized crime and peace operations, past, present and future

James Cockayne

Even before the tragic earthquake of 12 January 2010, Haiti was described as ‘the world’s first permanent failed state’.1 There has, arguably, however, never been a ‘state’ that has failed in Haiti, if by statehood we mean, following Weber, an institutionalized monopoly of legitimate violence. Instead, the Haitian ‘state’ has long been one ‘player’ in what is here termed an ongoing ‘protection competition’: a competition among two or more social actors vying to ‘protect’ a population through the control of violence exercised over them, however legitimized. As the term ‘protection’ implies, some actors offer populations consensual protection from real or perceived threats; others operate coercive protection rackets, protecting populations from a fabricated threat.2 Often, of course, monopolies of violence are legitimized through a combination of both consent and coercion. Competitors in a protection competition may offer radically different ‘systems of protection’, based not only on different forms of organization of violence, but also on different sources of legitimacy – appeals to charisma; original legitimacy drawn from religion, national identity or kinship; or rationalist justifications, often linked to values such as the protection of human rights and democratic participation. This chapter focuses on the competition in Haiti between two very different systems of protection between 1991 and 2007, both involving transnational organization of violence manifested in very particular localized forms.

The often-shifting protection competition that has played out on the western half of the island of Hispaniola since Christopher Columbus set foot there over 500 years ago has seen many contestants come and go, from foreign colonial powers to local dictators supported by paramilitaries.3 Particularly remarkable has been the prominent role of private, predatory and often commercialized violence, flourishing in the absence of responsible state institutions enjoying broad and deep social legitimacy. Manifestations of this private violence have changed over time: from piracy and slavery in the seventeenth century to the Duvaliers’ tontons macoutes in the twentieth. After that regime’s demise in the late 1980s, the state’s control of violence once again fragmented: the middle and upper classes relying on highly organized private security companies, while Haiti’s urban slums were controlled by neighbourhood protection rackets, vigilantism and gang violence.

With the state failing to achieve a legitimate monopoly of violence, Haiti has suffered a pattern akin to some African states. Competition between private groups and outsiders for control of the state, territory and the commercial flows that pass through it, have given rise to frequent ruptures and military coups d’état. Competing elite factions have sought to co-opt or capture the means of coercion and capital, with which to manipulate the largely disempowered masses.4 At the national level, shifting alliances of agricultural, mercantile and military interests have offered competing systems of patronage and protection, turning Haitian governance into a vicious zero-sum, winner-takes-all competition.

The pattern of neopatrimonial and often predatory rule produced by Haiti’s unresolved protection competition has left it weak and vulnerable to foreign intervention – and a fertile ground for parasitic networks of clandestine patronage, corruption and organized criminality.

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