Jasmine-Kim Westendorf's discomforting book investigates sexual misconduct by military peacekeepers and abuses perpetrated by civilian peacekeepers and non-UN civilian interveners.

Beverly Bell, an activist and award-winning writer, has dedicated her life to working for democracy, women's rights, and economic justice in Haiti and elsewhere. Since the 7.0 magnitude earthquake of January 12, 2010, that struck the island nation, killing more than a quarter-million people and leaving another two million Haitians homeless, Bell has spent much of her time in Haiti. Her new book, Fault Lines, is a searing account of the first year after the earthquake.

Haiti, long noted for poverty and repression, has a powerful and too-often-overlooked history of resistance. Women in Haiti have played a large role in changing the balance of political and social power, even as they have endured rampant and devastating state-sponsored violence, including torture, rape, abuse, illegal arrest, disappearance, and assassination. Beverly Bell, an activist and an expert on Haitian social movements, brings together thirty-eight oral histories from a diverse group of Haitian women.

This chapter describes how humanitarian aid is gendered and how this in turn affects Haitian women designated as beneficiaries. It analyses the ways in which gender-based violence (GBV) was defined by international agencies to serve to legitimize foreign control while they render Haitian people intelligible within a foreign moral compass, categorizing beneficiaries who are subject to surveillance and discipline.

This chapter discusses the transitional state of Haiti since the Duvalier regime, characterising the country as marked by a series of crises which continue to make the lives of Haitians extremely difficult. To understand the geopolitical stakes and the terms of the current issue, it is important to also understand the context of the situation. For some years now, almost all analytic texts on Haiti take as a point of departure the difficult junction of transition that the country has been experiencing, in fact, since the fall of the Duvalier dictatorship in February 1986.