Factional Terror, Paramilitarism and Civil War in Haiti

“Factional Terror, Paramilitarism and Civil War in Haiti: The View from Port-au-Prince, 1994-2004” is a scholarly article discussing the observations made by J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, during the country’s heavily violent civil war. The article goes into great detail in order to discuss the events leading up to the civil unrest, taking into consideration many of the political, economic, and cultural influences that prompted the 1994 coup-d’état and the resulting ten years of extreme violence. The author, though, attempts to investigate the country’s bloodshed using the methodology developed by anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom, who believed that war is not a static event but instead one that shapes and is shaped by historical, social, and cultural contexts. Therefore, Kovats-Bernat attempts to investigate the country’s current bloodshed by taking three separate questions into consideration; what political advances led up to the war, what social aspects characterises the war’s violence, and how has the war affected the day-to-day-lives and cultural identities of Haitians?

Kovats-Bernat describes the three key concepts that he wishes to utilize in order to make such an investigation into the life of Haitians during the civil war: political history, social analysis of material conditions, and cultural context. However, he does not seem to aptly follow all definitions that he provides for each of these concepts all throughout his paper, at least not in a concise manner that is easily understood by the reader. Take ‘cultural context’, for example. Kovats-Bernat clearly states that by cultural context he means “individual and community narratives of violence... within a larger symbolic world...

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...ulk of this academic journal discusses primarily the “political developments that led to the war” (p.123), and therefore Kovats-Bernat has been successful in considering at least one of the three aspects that he had hoped to discuss. However, he does seem to be lacking when it comes to discussing his other two clearly define key concepts– exactly what the author originally claimed would result in ambiguous, subjective, and inaccurate observations. The author has not successfully been able to put an individual or community ‘face’ to the issue, and seems to focus more so on history rather than ethnography. Had he instead been successful in presenting Haiti’s political history as well as a more in-depth social analysis of material conditions and discussion of cultural context, there would be a much greater basis upon which I could express my confidence in the evidence.