Pacification Through Humanitarian Aid: Examining Canada’s Security-Development Role in Haiti

This project investigates the ways in which the logics of security have influenced Canadian foreign development policies and practices. In particular, it examines what has become known as the security-development nexus (Duffield, 2001), and how this nexus has precipitated a shift in the role of Canadian nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) involved in the restructuring of Haiti. I offer a parallel reading of the history of policing/security and development and reposition questions about the contemporary security-development nexus within a long-established political and economic process anticipated by notions of security forged during the Enlightenment. This imperial thinking has produced a multiplicity of pacification projects that include Haiti. Thus, I show that the work of contemporary Canadian NGOs in Haiti can be better understood within the broad historical project of police science.