Peace-building in Haiti: the case for vertical integration

In light of growing attention to grassroots and community-based approaches to peace-building, this paper explores this ‘local turn’ through an examination of ongoing efforts to address community-based insecurity in the urban slums of Port-au-Prince. In recent years, these communities have been the site of an ongoing series of experiments, involving a range of different actors, aimed at reclaiming them from armed gangs. However, the fragmented nature of these interventions and the range of different strategies deployed, from enforcement to inducement to engagement, have limited their overall impact. Drawing on a distinction between horizontally- and vertically-integrated peace-building, as well as on recent insights about the centrality of state-society relations in peace-building processes, we make a case for greater coherence and co-ordination between bottom-up community violence reduction efforts and top-down police reform. In the particular case of Haiti, we suggest that renewed interest in community policing may provide one platform through which a more vertically-integrated form of peace-building, one which connects community-level agency with wider, structural-level reform processes, might emerge.     

Rethinking Chile’s ‘Chicago Boys’: neoliberal technocrats or revolutionary vanguard?

The term ‘Chicago Boys’ remains closely associated with the orthodox neoliberal adjustment implemented in Chile by the Pinochet dictatorship. The conventional portrayal of the Chicago Boys is of a group of US-trained, technocratic economists who institutionalised neoliberal principles and technocratic prerogatives in public policymaking in Chile. This article will contend the Chicago Boys were much more than neoliberal technocrats: they were a revolutionary vanguard that designed and led a capitalist revolution and radically altered the material and ideological foundations of the nation.