IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/socmed/v70y2010i1p106-113.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Ruptures, rights, and repair: The political economy of trauma in Haiti

Author

Listed:
  • James, Erica Caple

Abstract

This article analyzes the unintended consequences of humanitarian and development interventions in Haiti implemented to facilitate its postconflict transition following the period of military rule between 1991 and 1994. International and national governmental and nongovernmental initiatives to provide redress and healing to victims of human rights abuses from this period inadvertently contributed to the growth of a political economy of trauma. I argue that state-sponsored and non-state interventions aimed at truth seeking, acknowledging past ruptures, and reparations have intersected with the politics of local communities in ways that contribute to the commoditization of suffering in the political economy of trauma. The experience of a woman whose bodily integrity and personal sovereignty were violated by members of Haiti's terror apparatus demonstrates the presence of a terror economy. My witnessing of her interactions with the international and national humanitarian and development aid organizations that assisted her in the aftermath of violation revealed the contours of the compassion economy. It is the compassion economy that is the particular focus of this article. I evaluate whether rendering visible or audible the individual and collective suffering of the past truly aid processes of social reconstruction, democratization, and peace building, especially in states plagued with ongoing social, political, and economic insecurity. I argue that the forms of citizenship that these interventions engender are rarely permanent, especially in fragile or failed states, and may exacerbate the societal cleavages that gave rise to conflict.

Suggested Citation

  • James, Erica Caple, 2010. "Ruptures, rights, and repair: The political economy of trauma in Haiti," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 70(1), pages 106-113, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:70:y:2010:i:1:p:106-113
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277-9536(09)00631-5
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Keys, Hunter M. & Kaiser, Bonnie N. & Kohrt, Brandon A. & Khoury, Nayla M. & Brewster, Aimée-Rika T., 2012. "Idioms of distress, ethnopsychology, and the clinical encounter in Haiti's Central Plateau," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 75(3), pages 555-564.
    2. Grayman, Jesse Hession, 2014. "Rapid response: Email, immediacy, and medical humanitarianism in Aceh, Indonesia," Social Science & Medicine, Elsevier, vol. 120(C), pages 334-343.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:socmed:v:70:y:2010:i:1:p:106-113. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/315/description#description .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.