Haiti’s plight
The destructive earthquake that hit Haiti in January was only the most recent of the Caribbean nation’s troubles. Years of war, political terror, and dictatorship had left the country in deep disrepair. Failed states such as Haiti do not just engender internal strife and violence, however, but can also lead to damaged psyches among their inhabitants, a problem MIT anthropologist Erica James explores in a new book, “Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention,” published by the University of California Press. The psychological toll of political instability, she contends, has never been effectively addressed on a large scale by the outside countries and non-governmental organizations trying to help Haiti. Indeed, the “paradox” of well-meaning aid, James writes, has been that “many of the efforts to rehabilitate the nation and its citizens, and to promote democracy and economic stability, inadvertently reinforced the practices of predation, corruption and repression that they were intended...