Profs and Pints Online presents: “Understanding Politics in Haiti,” with Jean Eddy Saint Paul, professor of sociology at Brooklyn College and founding director of the City University of New York’s Haitian Studies Institute.

[This talk will remain available in recorded form at the link given here for tickets and access.]

The July assassination of President Jovenel Moïse of Haiti marked the fifth assassination of a leader of an island nation long rendered politically unstable by internal power struggles and the actions of the United States and France.

Gain a deep understanding of Haiti’s history and the sources of its political instability in this talk by Dr. Jean Eddy Saint Paul, a social theorist and scholar of history who teaches courses on Haitian history and Caribbean politics.

Dr. Saint Paul will employ historical sociology to highlight how, since Haiti’s founding, every progressive leader who has sought to assert Haitian sovereignty and dignity has confronted resistance from coercive forces at home and abroad. The goal of such forces has been to defeat whatever threatens the dominance of the racialized capitalism of the West.

Among the events Dr. Saint Paul will examine are the 1806 assassination of Haiti’s founder, Emperor Jacques Dessalines; the U.S. invasion and occupation of Haiti in 1915; and the 1950 coup against Haitian president Dumarsais Estimé.

Turning his attention to more recent events, he’ll look at the impact of the conditional support that the U.S. government provided to the dynastic dictatorship of the Duvaliers between 1957 and 1986; how the CIA was implicated in the 1991 coup against democratically elected Haitian president Jean-Bertrand Aristide; and the mismanagement of the monies fundraised for Building Haiti Back and Better in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake. Such developments, he’ll argue, have conditioned and prepared Haiti for the current decay of the institutional fabric that shapes the Haitian state.

Profs & Pints Online: Understanding Politics in Haiti