Humanitarian Crime

Reviews / Votes

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 subordinate 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