Katrina, in this respect, is exemplary.

Haiti is another case in point, because the impact of the earthquake and the aftermath is so horrendous in large part because of the country’s history. Humans are complex creatures, and it’s possible to chew gum and walk at the same time. So there’s no necessary contradiction between, say, giving to Médecins Sans Frontières *and* seeking to understand what’s now happening in all its dimensions. We need to take great care not to strip those affected by disaster of agency, and to recognise their inalienable right to shape their own destinies; again a right that doesn’t negate a swift and well targeted humanitarian response.

With all that in mind, this is essentially a links post, to some of the most illuminating material I’ve found online about Haiti. As always, linking doesn’t necessarily imply endorsement, only a recommendation to read, and think.

There’s a lot more out there, and I’d also like this post to be a solicitation for sharing resources and links.

* Naomi Klein has collected on her Facebook Page a range of resources, and her own writing about debt justice, disaster capitalism, and the IMF’s response;

* Reviewing Peter Hallward’s book Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide and the Politics of Containment for the New Statesman, Slavoj Žižek writes of the political history of containing Haitian democracy;

* SocProf writes about sociologist Saskia Sassen’s analysis of Haiti and debt at The Global Sociology Blog, where she also turns an eye to the figure of the scary looter;

* At TomDispatch.Com, Rebecca Solnit looks at when the media become the disaster;

* Ben Ehrenreich at Slate examines how the focus on securing Haiti before distributing aid is being interpreted.

Previous discussion on LP: Here.

In 1999, the celebrated historian Eric Hobsbawm participated in a range of conversations with Italian writer Antonio Polito, subsequently published as On The Edge of The New Century. One of the most striking points Hobsbawm made was that the secular trend of the increasing ability of states to prevent non-state violence on their own territory went into reverse in the 1970s. That’s not the sort of declining power of the state that globalists normally talk of (preferring to see the state as losing power to the market), but it’s at the centre of a lot of what is happening in today’s world, and what is happening to make it a far less safe place. One could hardly imagine that a hypothetical Indian victory in war over Pakistan would render either that territory governable or India’s less violent. As well as assymetry in warfare, we’re also seeing the fruits of a deterritorialisation of identifications which can be pushed to the ultimate limit of death, and the state is also presenting itself as something far more akin to what “public” authority was in pre-modern history – a competing power centre among many. These shifts demand far more thinking through – because in many respects far too many of our political and social currents are still shaped by the concepts of a modernity now partially in ruins. One sociological thinker who’s been doing this hard work is Saskia Sassen, long one of the most interesting writers on globalisation, and she has an important article in Open Democracy on the implications of warfare over the space of the city, prompted by the Mumbai terror attacks.

There is a deeper transformation afoot. It is still rare but it is more frequently becoming visible. It is as if the centre no longer holds. Cities seem to be losing the capacity they have long had to triage conflict – through commerce, through civic activity. The national state, confronted with a similar conflict, has historically chosen to go to war. In my new research project – on cities and war – I am studying whether cities are losing this capacity and are becoming sites for a range of new types of violence.

Further, the new asymmetric wars have the effect of urbanising war. This brings with it a nasty twist: when national states go to war in the name of national security, nowadays major cities are likely to become a key frontline space. In older conventional wars, large armies needed large open fields or oceans to meet and fight, and these were the frontline spaces.

Today the search for national security may well become a source for urban insecurity.

The whole article can be read here.

Elsewhere: At the Global Sociology Blog, there’s a complementary post from SocProf where she also takes a look at Sassen’s work in the context of Mumbai as a space of globalisation.