Francesco Segoni
In Port-au-Prince, bursts of Kalashnikov fire are part of the everyday soundscape. But violence is no longer fought only with small arms. Rocket launchers, heavy machine guns, and military-grade assault rifles are now widely circulating among armed groups, marking a deep militarization of urban conflict. Entire neighborhoods are under the control of gang coalitions; major roads are opened or closed depending on shifting criminal balances; the capital lives in a permanent state of suffocation.
Two years after the deployment of the Kenyan-led Multinational Security Support Mission — authorized by the United Nations and logistically backed by the United States — the initial goal of stabilization appears out of reach. Having abandoned any attempt to reverse the trajectory of the crisis, the international intervention is gradually redefining its ambitions: the project of restoring order has turned into a tool for managing the most destabilizing effects of Haiti’s collapse. The aim is to contain violence just enough to prevent its regional consequences (especially migration-related ones).
The Kenyan force operates in a fragmented and disjointed urban landscape that is the tangible reflection of political reality. Much of the city is outside state control. Gang territorial power remains vast, and violence regularly targets strategic infrastructure. Toussaint Louverture International Airport has been forced to close for extended periods due to close-range fighting, physically isolating the country. The resumption of commercial flights, still fragile and intermittent, is one of the few concrete results of international intervention: essentially a logistical rather than political gain, preventing total isolation but not altering the balance of power on the ground.
The power vacuum pushes local communities to organize more or less spontaneously for self-defense. Vigilante groups known as Bwa Kalé, born as a popular reaction to the inertia of law enforcement, carry out summary justice. Their methods are no different from those of gangs: lynchings and public executions. Bwa Kalé does not act as a barrier to gang violence but instead reflects and amplifies its logic: the normalization of arbitrariness in a context where the state no longer holds a monopoly over force or justice.
This situation is not the result of a sudden collapse but of a long institutional decay culminating in the assassination of President Jovenel Moïse in July 2021. His death did not merely create a power vacuum: it shattered the last, however fragile, balance between economic elites, security apparatuses, and criminal networks. From that moment, Haiti entered a failed-state dynamic. Gangs did not simply occupy spaces abandoned by the state; they built parallel governance mechanisms, imposing informal taxation, controlling trade routes, and managing access to essential goods. Coalitions such as the armed group G9, led by former police officer Jimmy Chérizier, known as “Barbecue,” have turned territorial control into de facto political power.
The relationship between gangs and political power in Haiti is not a recent anomaly. For decades, armed groups have functioned as informal militias serving political competition, used to intimidate opponents, control urban territory, distribute patronage, and regulate economic and social flows that the state was unable—or unwilling—to govern directly. Gangs long acted as instruments: nurtured, tolerated, and protected in exchange for loyalty and political utility.
Over time, this instrumental relationship has been reversed. Gangs have accumulated resources, weapons, organizational capacity, and local legitimacy; they have federated into coalitions capable of coordinated attacks. From controlled militias, they have become autonomous decision-makers, even holding hostage the very powers that once supported them. Today they do not merely respond to political centers of power: they shape them. This dynamic explains why violence is not only criminal but deeply political. The threat of paralyzing the country becomes a language of negotiation.
The police are numerically inferior, less well armed, and structurally outmatched by the gangs. They are themselves affected by clientelist and criminal infiltration that undermines their chain of command. In many neighborhoods they are absent; in others, tolerated or subordinated to arrangements imposed by armed actors. The monopoly of force, the foundation of the modern state, has effectively dissolved.
The security collapse is accompanied by an almost total institutional paralysis. Elections can no longer be organized, and Haiti today has neither a sitting president nor a functioning parliament. Executive power is concentrated in the hands of Prime Minister Alix Didier Fils-Aimé, heading a transitional government lacking electoral legitimacy. In the absence of representation and political mediation, armed violence has become the only remaining regulatory language.
This is not the first time the international community has attempted to “fix” Haiti through external intervention. The most well-known and controversial precedent remains MINUSTAH, the UN mission deployed between 2004 and 2017 after the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. For over a decade, UN peacekeepers contained urban violence and supported central institutions. But the political and human cost of the mission was extremely high: systematic human rights violations, sexual exploitation of the local population, and above all the devastating cholera outbreak introduced in 2010 by Nepalese UN troops, which caused thousands of deaths and which the United Nations struggled for years to acknowledge openly.
That trauma has left a deep mark on Haitian collective memory. The “minimalist” approach adopted in 2024 with Kenyan troops appears shaped by fears of further inflaming the situation and imposing yet another painful experience on the population.
By supporting the Kenyan-led international mission, the United States has avoided direct military involvement in the Caribbean, delegating operational responsibility to an African partner. If the mission’s only tangible result is securing key logistical nodes, it nevertheless allows the Trump administration to consider conditions met for reversing its migration policy. The decision to revoke temporary protections granted to Haitians under the Biden administration signals a paradigm shift: Washington no longer intends to indefinitely absorb the consequences of the collapse. Security policy and migration policy thus appear as complementary elements of a broader strategy of external containment.
Possible scenarios for Haiti revolve around three main trajectories. The first is partial security stabilization under international supervision, with delayed but not abandoned elections. This is the scenario formally favored by Western partners, but it risks becoming a prolonged management of collapse. The second is a crystallization of chaos, a form of urban “Somalization”: nominal central authority, protected strategic nodes, and vast areas governed by local armed actors. In part, this scenario is already reality. The third, more difficult to accept, is a negotiated political reconfiguration that includes armed groups, transforming gangs into semi-institutional actors within a new order based on de facto power.
Contemporary Haiti is the historical product of ambiguous relations between political power and armed violence, intermittent international interventions, and institutions that were never fully consolidated. The international community can perhaps temporarily contain the collapse. But it cannot resolve, in place of Haitians, the central knot linking politics and coercion. And it is from that unresolved knot that the country’s future will ultimately depend.
