Haïti à Travers les Pages

  The Arrested Revolution: Haiti's Crisis of Listening and the Case for Polycentric Power By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson (Le Français suit) Port-au-Prince has perfected a peculiar kind of deafness. It is not the deafness of distance — the capital is, after all, only a few hours by road from almost anywhere in the country that still has a passable road. It is the deafness of a state whose ear has been surgically detached from its body. When pine trees fall in the southeast, when barricades rise in Kap Ayisyen, when families in Wannament negotiate passage with men holding rifles older than the children they are trying to feed, the sound travels — but it travels into a chamber built to absorb it. Johnny Celestin, in his recent essay, names this condition with admirable economy: the connections are broken. No credible elections. No accountable taxation. No mechanism by which the cry of a citizen becomes the calculation of a minister. He is right. But I want to push his diagnosis f...

    “Haiti’s Civil Society Revolt: Can a ‘Government of the Wises’ Succeed Where the Politicians Failed?”   By Patrick Prézeau Stephenson *  (Le français suit)   In late 2025, as Haiti staggers through yet another season of fear and disillusionment, a coalition of civil society organizations has stepped onto the national stage with a proposition that is, in equal measure, audacious and overdue. The text they have circulated is framed as a call to rescue the republic. It opens with an appeal to imagination: a Haiti “finally master of its own destiny,” where gangs no longer rule neighborhoods, institutions function, citizens participate, and “national decisions are no longer dictated by foreign interests.” It is the kind of language Haitians have heard before, and learned to distrust. What makes this document different is not its rhetoric, but the political architecture it proposes—and the fact that, this time, the authors are not politicians. They cal...