Democratic Insecurities ─ Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti

Democratic Insecurities focuses on the ethics of military and humanitarian intervention in Haiti, during and after Haitl's 1991 coup. In this powerful ethnography of violencs, Erica Caple James oxplores the traumas of Haitian victims whose experionces were denied by U.S. officlals and recognized only selectively by other humanitarian providers.

"Haiti's catastrophic earthquake follows a decade of crisis in governance and in everyday social life. The international and unintended consequences have commodified suffering, institutionalized insecurity, and fashioned a troubling and troubled `democracy.' This book is a major achievement!"

"This is a remarkable piece of scholarship. Erica James has raised the bar as far as solid ethnographic Inquiry in Haiti goes. Her research will. I predict, open new doors."

"Erica James's book courageously questions our categories of thought and models of action to confront endless Haitian tragedies, from victimization to humanitarianism, bringing together, in an unprecedented analysis, what she calls the economies of terror and the economies of compassion."

"A work of extraordinary depth that sets new standards on the themes of violence and social suffering."

"James draws us in via an astonishingly vivid and unsettling account of her first weeks in Haiti. This book is a highly sophisticated, compelling, and instructive read and an outstanding example of ethnography by one of the leading anthropologists in the field of trauma."

Erica Caple James is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.