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From time to time catastrophes remind us of the dangers lurking along the uncertain paths of historical development. Such was the case with the banking crisis which made the destructive potential of neoliberalism clear for all to see. This is also the case with the Haitian earthquake which left 250,000 dead and 1.5 million homeless. At this point we should not be talking about global responsibilities in the abstract, we should be naming the responsible parties.

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Since the beginning of 2000s, in order to let poor people accede to meat consumption, several developing countries have opened their domestic chicken market to foreign imports, by reducing import tariffs. Thus local chicken meat competes with frozen pieces of chicken imported from the European Union or America, causing the loss of many jobs in the local chicken food chain.

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This article combines health and water research results, evidence from confidential documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, legal analysis, and discussion of historical context to demonstrate that actions taken by the international community through the Inter-American Development Bank are directly related to a lack of access to clean water in Haiti. The article demonstrates that these actions constitute a clear violation of Haitians’ right to water under both domestic and international law. The article exposes the United States government’s role in blocking the disbursal of millions of dollars in international bank loans that would have had life-saving consequences for the Haitian people.

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Since the early 1990s Canada has played a key role in Haiti’s development process. The article explores whether Canada’s foreign policy is becoming more reliant on military-assisted solutions, including peacekeeping, as a way to solve Haiti’s internal problems and achieve good governance. The article also examines the Canadian concepts called “Responsibility to Protect, React and Rebuild” which are linked to humanitarian intervention, and their implication for Haitian sovereignty.

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In August 1791, after a massive meeting of slaves in the Bois Cayman that ended up in an equally massive vodú ceremony, the first Latin-American independence revolution took place: it was that of Haiti, which back then was known as the French colony of Saint-Domingue, and was, by far, the wealthiest colony any colonial power had ever settled in America. Haiti declared its independence in 1804 (and, with the foreseeable exception of Cuba, no other country in the entire continent celebrated a ‘bicentenary’ in 2004, waiting instead for the 2010 bicentenaries of all the other ‘bourgeois’ and ‘white’ Latin-American revolutions

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In this article, I explore the limits of dominant historiographies of Haiti to examine and challenge binary frameworks within discourses of globalization and civil society. I employ a comparative, longue durée world-systems approach, discussing Haiti’s history and contemporary situation through long-term fieldwork, oral history, and published materials on Haiti’s history. Conversations with different groups of Haitian people helped me identify, analyze, and categorize two dominant historiographies.

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This article seeks to analyze Frederick Douglass’ responses to U.S. empire formation in Santo Domingo, between 1870-1872, and in Haiti, between 1889-1891. As U.S. Minister to Haiti and as Assistant Secretary of U.S. President Ulysses S. Grant’s commission to annex the Dominican Republic, Douglass fully supported the virtues of U.S. expansion and U.S. Pan-Americanism as long as it promoted effective and egalitarian development in Caribbean and Latin American nations. However, Douglass opposed U.S. empire if it perpetuated U.S. notions of racial domination.

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A preponderance of the ethnographies published by researchers working in Haiti during the 1930s and 1940s focus on the Vodou religion. Yet the fact that many Haitian popular ritual practices were officially prohibited by penal law, first as «sortilèges» and later as «pratiques superstitieuses», and, on this basis, subject to US Marine, Protestant missionary, Catholic Church, and Haitian state offensives during these same years, is not always well-acknowledged or documented in this ethnographic literature.

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