The Triumph of Non-Intervention?

Haiti and the Contemporary Politics of Rescue

Haitian boy with Brazilian UN soldier Daniel Aguilar/Reuters

It is both a declaration of humanist solidarity and a cri de coeur.  While the principle of non-intervention remains a bedrock principle of international order, it is no license for indifference. Intervention—military, humanitarian or both—should still be considered a moral imperative in exceptional cases “whenever cruelty and suffering are extreme and no local forces seem capable of putting an end to them.”  In a world replete with actions that shock the conscience, questions about when, how and where to intervene refuse to go away, despite their inherent messiness and uncertainty, despite the temptation to declare emerging humanitarian disasters as “not our problem,” and despite the myriad cautionary tales offered by past interventions.  If the “supposedly decent people of this world”—those with the capacity to act and an avowed commitment to the universality of human rights—refuse to step up, then who will?  

Such sentiments feel very à propos of the present moment of global politics, and could apply equally to a growing number of ongoing humanitarian crises.  That they were in fact written 30 years ago by the American moral philosopher Michael Walzer (1995)—in the wake of the Rwandan genocide and the launch of the U.S.-led Operation Restore Democracy in Haiti, and amidst ongoing ethnic cleansing in Bosnia—is a sobering reminder that the core dilemmas of international crisis intervention remain both urgent and unresolved.  Walzer’s article effectively captured the confused zeitgeist of the immediate post-cold war era, a period in which the world seemed to be simultaneously falling apart and being remade, and where injecting an ethical dimension to the practice of foreign policy was both newly possible and deeply fraught.  Three decades on, global-level efforts to govern humanitarian catastrophe appear to have come full circle. This is despite the many lessons learned from a broad range of international interventions in the world’s fragile and conflict-affected contexts, the establishment of an International Criminal Court and the emergence of a Responsibility to Protect doctrine as a signal of collective resolve to “never again” default to inertia in the face of atrocity. Once again, the international community appears unable to provide decisive, convincing answers to the critical questions with which Walzer was grappling.

For Haiti to have returned to the docket of the UN Security Council at this particular moment is, therefore, deeply inauspicious.  Three decades after Operation Restore Democracy, and three years after the assassination of President Jovenel Moise triggered its latest political crisis, Haiti finds itself increasingly in the grip of powerful criminal gangs, who have killed thousands (5,000 in 2024 alone, according to UN figures) and prompted hundreds of thousands more to flee.  Basic services have collapsed, hunger is on the rise (with fully half the population not having enough to eat), and the country is edging ever closer to outright state failure.  The initial international response, the Security Council-authorized and Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support (MSS) mission, has been underfunded, understaffed and outgunned, and has struggled to alter the trajectory of violence on the ground.  Indeed, it may ultimately prove to be the case that the MSS response was worse than no response at all, creating the illusion of international engagement while easing the pressure for a more robust intervention, even as the body count of Haitian civilians continues to climb.  In a belated acknowledgement of the reality that hundreds of Kenyan cops cannot succeed where thousands of UN peacekeepers and US troops before them had failed, Haiti’s Transitional Presidential Council in October finally made a formal request to convert the MSS into a full-fledged UN peace operation. 

That it has come to this is as good an indication of any of the desperate situation in which Haiti currently finds itself.  Over the course of what is now a long history of UN-led efforts to stabilize, democratize and pacify Haiti, the relationship between peacekeepers and Haitians has generated considerable bad blood, especially since the UN has long been the most visible manifestation of an international presence that Haitians came to view with both weariness and suspicion.  The nadir came in the aftermath of Haiti’s massive 2010 earthquake, when MINUSTAH peacekeepers compounded Haitian suffering by inadvertently introducing cholera into an unfolding humanitarian catastrophe; the UN’s subsequent efforts to deny legal and moral responsibility for the outbreak added insult to injury.  Fifteen years on, given a flailing MSS and the lack of appetite (from either side) for yet another unilateral U.S. intervention, the institution of peacekeeping has once again emerged as a solution of last resort, unloved perhaps but also indispensable.

While the argument for intervention in Haiti appears unassailable on humanitarian grounds—the level of cruelty and suffering has undoubtedly crossed a critical threshold, and no one seriously believes that Haiti can extricate itself from the current crisis without significant external security assistance—the hurdles to getting UN boots back on the ground in Haiti are likely to prove even more daunting now than they were in the early 1990’s.  Despite plenty of hand-wringing about “other people’s wars,” in the early post-cold war period, the United States also enjoyed global primacy as the last superpower standing, and was buoyed by the belief—as were other key members of the industrialized West—in the power of liberal ideas and institutions, backed by military force, to transform conflict-affected societies into peaceful liberal democracies.  In contrast, recent decades have seen a deepening crisis of liberal peacebuilding (with liberal hubris curdling into liberal despair), while the resurgence of China and Russia, both veto-wielding members of the Security Council, has drastically curtailed multilateral ambition, and possibility, with regard to peacemaking, peacekeeping and peacebuilding.  The United States, for its part, remains for the moment prepared to commit money if not troops to help stabilize Haiti, although the incoming Trump administration—if campaign messaging is any indication—is likely to be more interested in returning Haitian migrants (accelerating return flights that have continued under the Biden administration through the current crisis) than restoring Haitian democracy.  While close observers of Security Council dynamics still express optimism that the Council can still act—despite deepening divisions among its permanent five members—where mutual interests align, and that Haiti may yet prove to be one of these exceptions, it may also be the case that Haiti may be crowded out in the coming months by larger crises of greater strategic import.

While the geopolitical context has become decidedly less favorable for the establishment of new peace operations, the legacy of past interventions in Haiti also casts a heavy shadow on the future.  The UN touts peacekeeping as an effective tool to help countries navigate the difficult path from conflict to peace, but in Haiti’s case this journey has been more Sisyphean than linear.  Across a diverse range of discrete missions starting with the UN Mission in Haiti (UNMIH) in 1993, the pattern has been one of stabilization, followed by periods of democratization and institution-building, which over time gave way to drift, decay, and renewed crisis.  The considerable efforts that have gone into consolidating state-level institutions—most notably the Haitian National Police—have proven unsustainable in the continued absence of anything resembling a social contract between governors and governed.  Indeed, as University of Virginia Professor Robert Fatton has argued, since gaining independence in 1804 Haiti has struggled to reach a “compromise equilibrium,” involving “the relative reconciliation of the fundamental interests of the ruling class with certain aspirations and demands of subordinates.”  What has prevailed instead has been an “oligarchy in the raw,” marked by extreme levels of socio-economic inequality and an elite class determined to keep politics, through violence as necessary, as exclusive as possible.

In addition to overcoming intervention fatigue, therefore, any reconstituted UN peace operation in Haiti faces two critical challenges.  The first, and most obvious, involves dislodging the armed gangs, who have proven themselves better organized, and better armed, than during previous crises.  Far from backstopping a beleaguered Haitian National Police, as the MSS was meant to do, any new UN mission will need, at least initially, to be configured for urban warfare rather than for conventional peacekeeping.  While not a task for the faint of heart, there is at least precedent for how to proceed.  In 2007, MINUSTAH forces—under the leadership of Brazil— undertook a similar campaign against a metastasizing gang problem in the narrow precincts of Port-au-Prince.  Over the course of several months and several well-planned military operations, neighborhoods such as Cité Soleil were progressively liberated from gang control, with some 800 gang members arrested in the process.  For an organization that to this day remains deeply ambivalent about the use of force in the name of peace, the campaign remains of the most dramatic episodes of robust peacekeeping in UN history.

While stabilizing Haiti will require a willingness on the part of any intervention force to both inflict and absorb casualties, the more elusive challenge will involve the transition from stabilization to consolidation.  As James Foley, a former U.S. Ambassador to Haiti, recently observed, foreign military personnel are no panacea for the myriad security and political challenges that Haiti faces. Breaking the country’s ongoing cycle of dysfunction and despair means not only re-establishing functional institutions but also empowering Haitians to take responsibility for their country’s future. While elections are one piece of this bigger puzzle—the Transitional Council has committed to holding long-delayed elections by November 2025—they too are no panacea, and on their own rarely mark a decisive shift towards a more stable order.  Indeed, Haiti’s own recent electoral history demonstrates how elections perceived as tainted can inflame grievances and fuel further de-stabilization.  Ultimately, as James Cockayne has observed, creating the conditions for a new, more stable political order to emerge in Haiti will require uprooting “deeply embedded networks of hidden power,” which have for decades linked Haiti’s political-business elite with armed gangs, who have always re-constituted themselves, phoenix-like, in the aftermath of attempts to eradicate them.  Any attempt to “empower” Haitians therefore must necessarily involve “disempowering” such networks, whose influence over Haiti’s political economy remains both pervasive and pernicious, in order to create the conditions in which a less dysfunctional politics might emerge over time. This, however, remains the Achilles’ Heel of international intervention in Haiti (and elsewhere): beyond calling for Haitian elites to find “the better angels of their nature” and put national interest over self-interest, even the most robust interventions have proven incapable of transforming the most important drivers of conflict and instability.  UN peacekeepers, in short, cannot on their own establish, let alone impose, sustainable peace in Haiti.  At best, they can only create the conditions in which Haitians themselves are given another opportunity to do so.  As Walzer recognized long ago, while decision-makers may despair about the risks, the costs, and the odds of succeeding where previous interventions have failed, the costs of stalemate and inaction may be greater still.    

Timothy Donais is a Professor at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and in the Department of Global Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, both in Waterloo, Canada.  His research focuses on the protection of civilians in conflict contexts, post-conflict peacebuilding, and security sector reform.