Governando o Haiti : colonialidade, controle e resistência subalterna

Abstract

This thesis is dedicated to understanding the relationships of coloniality that have operated government practices during and after the colonization of Haiti, showing the control techniques imposed by the intervening governments and the Haitian resistance struggles in response to the colonial violence. We seek to explore, in the central episodes of Haitian history, the successive security and criminalization policies undertaken by numerous foreign occupations, which, under the guise of chaos and proclaiming the need to restore order in a country of Blacks unable to govern themselves (Pierre-Charles. 1977:183), land their troops and proceed to the military/police occupation of the land, intimidating the movement of Haitian masses. As in colonial times, recent interventions make use of an ethnocentric discourse on the crisis of the Haitian state institutions, especially the ones related to public security, to legitimize and combat the threat that a country without a strong criminal apparatus represents, according to the Western model, to international security. We explore new criminological possibilities, incited by the concept of coloniality of power to understand the control techniques and the violence imposed during and after the Haitian colonization. We are interested in thinking about these practices of oppression from the standpoint of those who suffered their effects, focusing on how the security apparatus were instrumentalized/shaped by colonization policies aiming to deepen the colonial split and the binary logic inherent to them. Finally, we explore how relations of coloniality are established and invigorated by the security policies of the United Nations. We seek to understand how the UN program aimed at establishing Western institutions of crime control in unstable and unsafe countries is part of a wider movement for democratization/pacification of peripheral governments, led and intensified by the international security regime after the Cold War. We discuss how these pro-democracy interventions were made in the haitian nation, with special focus on the governance techniques implemented by the United Nations Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH).