Vigilantism in Haiti: Manifestations of Non-State Forms of Protection in a Context of Urban Humanitarian Crisis
- Vigilance brigades have multiplied across Haiti's ten departments at particular historical moments, often with the complicity or support of judicial, administrative and police authorities.
- The international community's legalistic approach conflates vigilantism with mob justice and calls for the brigades' extinction, but this stance is not historically or culturally grounded in Haiti's context of normative pluralism.
- Most citizens, including brigade members and residents of protected neighborhoods, do not support lynching, which is governed by a separate informal convention involving other actors.
- Brigades offer potential benefits including community mobilization, support during humanitarian response and auxiliary police functions in intelligence, surveillance and order maintenance.
- Without public regulation, brigades risk political capture, corruption for personal enrichment and human rights abuses; the study recommends legal and organisational supervision within a co-production of security rather than prohibition.
This research report, produced for Oxfam and the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) with funding from the UK's DFID Urban Crises Learning Fund, investigates whether the failure of public security actors has fostered a plurality of non-state forms of social control in Haiti's poor neighborhoods and displacement camps. The methodology combines documentary research with 30 semi-structured individual interviews and 2 group interviews across three purposive samples (brigade members, residents of brigade-protected neighborhoods, and senior state and civil society figures), with data covering 1986 to 2016.
The study profiles the vigilance brigades' formation, roles, command structures, functioning, armament and public perception; analyzes their contested legality between legitimate defense and mob justice; and documents mutual distrust and ambiguous relations between brigades and the police, along with failed attempts at official supervision. The authors argue that the international community's legalistic approach, which equates vigilantism with lynch justice and calls for the brigades' progressive extinction, ignores Haiti's normative pluralism and the brigades' historical role.
They conclude that brigades offer real potential (community mobilization, support to humanitarian response, auxiliary intelligence and order functions) but carry risks of drift, and recommend legal, technical and organisational regulation by public authorities within a co-production of security, alongside reform of the penal chain.
How to cite
CRESEJ, 2017, Vigilantism in Haiti: Manifestations of Non-State Forms of Protection in a Context of Urban Humanitarian Crisis, https://www.iied.org/fr/10843fiied