The Cost of Regime Survival: Political Instability, Underdevelopment, and (Un)natural Disasters in Haiti Before the 2010 Earthquake

Abstract

This article critically examines the underlying political and structural conditions that lead to Haiti’s underdevelopment and the vulnerability of the country to natural disasters. Using the scholarship of Percy Hintzen and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, the article argues that disjunctures in the post-revolutionary governance of Haiti created conditions of precarity, vulnerability, and preempted possibilities for development. Those disjunctures were exacerbated under the Duvaliers and continue to be part of the fabric of Haiti. The explanation rests in the policies and practices of powerful domestic and foreign actors with vested interests in maintaining conditions of underdevelopment. This explains the failure of the county to effectively respond to extreme natural events such as earthquakes and hurricanes, thereby transforming them into pervasive natural disasters. The calamities that the world noticed on January 12, 2010 were simply an epiphenomenon of those deeply underlying conditions.