Humanitarian Crime

Nyhet

Disasters, Dispossession, and Resistance in Port-au-Prince

Inbunden, Engelska, 2026

2 729 kr

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This is the first book to theorise humanitarian power within the crimes of the powerful tradition. It offers a compelling account of the structural forces embedded in humanitarian institutions, and the practices and forms of legitimation through which the violent effects of humanitarian intervention are typically produced and obscured.Focusing on post-earthquake Haiti, a setting marked by large-scale international involvement and deep historical and colonial inequalities, the book examines how humanitarian organisations helped shape the city’s post-disaster landscape. It shows how humanitarian actors, working alongside the Haitian state, contributed to the reproduction of homelessness, landlessness, and urban exclusion through their management of displacement camps, their reliance on property-based models of assistance, and their role in coercive programmes of camp closure.Drawing on extensive fieldwork, interviews, and archival research, the book develops the concept of humanitarian crime to illuminate the state processes, institutional arrangements, and material structures that underpin violent outcomes in humanitarian settings. At the same time, it centres the voices of Haitian civil society and affected communities, highlighting how those subjected to state–humanitarian expulsions interpret, contest, and resist the harms inflicted through humanitarian governance. It foregrounds land occupations and informal urbanisation as key forms of resistance that expose and challenge the dispossession inscribed within the everyday workings of humanitarian intervention.By situating humanitarianism within wider relations of sovereignty, accumulation, and control, the book opens new pathways for studying humanitarian power and its role within contemporary global violences. It also establishes a research agenda for understanding humanitarian crime and for examining how contemporary crises, not least increasingly frequent climate disasters, are being governed in ways that only deepen precarity and dispossession.This book is essential reading for all those engaged in work on crimes of the powerful, disaster recovery, state and corporate crime, and Caribbean Studies.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum2026-06-01
Mått156 x 234 x undefined mm
FormatInbunden
SpråkEngelska
SerieCrimes of the Powerful
Antal sidor196
FörlagTaylor & Francis Ltd
ISBN9781032750736

1. Humanitarian Crime: An Introduction 2. Humanitarianism in Crimes of the Powerful Research 3. Port-au-Prince and The Making of a Violent Urban Order 4. Governing the “Ungovernable” City: Humanitarianism and Managing Urban Crisis 5. Forced Evictions and Campicide as State-Humanitarian Crime 6. Exposing Humanitarian Crimes of Dispossession 7. Camp Afterlives and Humanitarian Denial 8. Concluding Reflections

Humanitarian Crime advances a rigorous theorisation of the structural harms produced by humanitarian interventions. Centring post-earthquake Haiti as the epicentre of imperial governance, Angela Sherwood conceptualises humanitarian crime to elucidate how Global North aid regimes perpetuate colonial plunder, racialised legality, and neoliberal dispossession. These interlocking forces, Sherwood demonstrates, actively produce the very disastrous conditions that subordinates Global South societies to post-disaster humanitarian intervention. This groundbreaking book expands the crimes of the powerful scholarship by revealing the criminogenic entanglements of humanitarianism, state, and colonial power.Jose Atiles, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign.In this brilliant and searing analysis of humanitarian crime in Haiti, Angela Sherwood has effectively developed a new field of criminological enquiry. As humanitarian organisations increasingly assume the corporate form and align themselves with state organisational goals that ultimately conflict with their own, sometimes dubious, ethical protocols, the possibility of engaging in human rights violations against the very populations they exist to protect is heightened. By investigating how both the state and humanitarian organisations treated the landless and displaced after Haiti’s earthquake, Sherwood uncovers, in compelling detail, the structural conditions and institutional practices that both enable organisational deviance and embed humanitarianism within a broader system of criminogenic power.Penny Green, Professor of Law and Globalisation at Queen Mary University of London, Director of the International State Crime Initiative (ISCI)This is a powerful book that interrogates the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake in 2010. Angela Sherwood deploys a critical criminological and socio-legal perspective to reveal violent and harmful systems of administration and power relations, orchestrated by the state-humanitarian nexus. Angela conclusively shows how the closure of humanitarian camps as a marker of successful reconstruction, was in fact a violent form of administering further displacement, or of ‘disappearing the earthquake displaced’. But running parallel to dispossession is resistance and power. Angela reveals a counterhegemonic form of reconstruction, where previously displaced communities reclaim land, build a home and reject the norms of private property. This is an urgent book with a unique vantage point, and from which we can interrogate the destruction and reconstruction of other vulnerable geographical landscapes now and in the future.Victoria Cooper, Senior Lecturer in Criminology and Social Policy at the Open University