With elections postponed for a third time in Haiti, and with security governance and security governance being key issues at both the national and local levels, the SSR Resource Centre created this SSR Country Snapshot to highlight key recent publications published by the Centre for Security Governance.
Last Updated: January 2016
On security sector reform
#1 | Police Reform | The development of the National Police, public security and the rule of law in Haiti
Centre for Security Governance (CSG) Senior Fellow Stephen Baranyi has co-authored a new report, with Yves Sainsiné, on the development of the National Police, public security and the rule of law in Haiti. The full report is available in French here. The English Executive Summary has also been published here on the SSR Resource Centre blog.
# 2 | Justice Reform | The Politics of Justice Reform in Haiti
This blog post provides a summary of a recent article, written by Louis-Alexandre Berg, which outlines the recent history of justice reform in Haiti. The system’s inability to adjudicate cases fairly, efficiently or impartially has consistently been treated as a “capacity” problem; interventions, which focused on improving capacity deficits in terms of the number of justice, lawyers, prosecutors and even the quality of legal aid, have largely failed to generate sustainable improvements.
# 3 | Defence Reform | Rethinking Haiti’s Armed Forces
This article discusses the reinstatement of Haiti’s armed forces, and suggests that some early concerns about the process may have been misplaced.
# 4 | Private Security Industry | From Private Security to Public Good: Regulating the Private Security Industry in Haiti
The paper analyzes the current state of the private security industry in Haiti and the legal framework under which it operates, and makes recommendations for how a reformed legal and regulatory regime can guide the next phase of its development, based on interviews with owners and agents of private security companies, industry associations, senior Haitian police personnel, United Nations (UN) planners and parliamentary leaders.
On gangs, violence and politics
# 1 | Urban Gangs Make Comeback as Political Goons in Haiti
It is commonly perceived that the motivation of Haiti’s urban gangs has changed from political to criminal – falsely so as my research has found. Rather, the function gangs fulfill for their sponsors is constantly shifting between political and criminal, as evidenced by the current re-emergence of political violence ahead of elections later this year.
# 2 | With Elections Looming, will Haiti’s Urban Gangs Re-emerge as Political Actors?
As Haiti enters a lengthy and no doubt turbulent period of electoral politics, the country’s long-standing drivers of conflict take on a particular significance. Gangs have figured prominently in Haiti’s recent political transitions, as national-level political actors have deployed urban gangs to generate violence and unrest as a strategic instrument of political influence.
# 3 | Vertically Integrated Peace Building and Community Violence Reduction in Haiti
A new article examines gang-driven violence in the urban slums of Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince. These communities have, in recent years, been the site of an ongoing series of experiments, involving a range of different actors, aimed at reclaiming them from armed gangs; however, the isolated and fragmented nature of these interventions has reduced their cumulative impact. The paper makes a case for greater coherence and coordination between bottom-up community violence reduction efforts and top-down police reform, based on a broader argument around the importance of “vertically integrated peace building.”
Background ‘historical’ info on security sector reform
Security Sector Reform Monitor: Haiti (last edition in 2010)
The Security Sector Reform Monitor was a quarterly publication that tracks developments and trends in the ongoing security sector reform (SSR) processes of five countries: Afghanistan, Burundi, East Timor, Haiti and South Sudan. Adopting a holistic definition of the security sector, the Monitor will cover a wide range of actors, topics and themes, from reforms in the rule of law institutions and armed forces to demilitarization activities and the role of non-statutory security and justice actors.
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