Following Haiti’s devastating earthquake of January 12, 2010, people around the world watched in disbelief at the scale of destruction—and, even harder to fathom, the apparent inability of the Haitian government to help its own citizens. Neighboring countries sent doctors and emergency supplies, concerned onlookers sent donations (nearly half of U.S. households contributed), and the United Nations sent a special envoy to coordinate the relief and reconstruction process. Yet this massive outpouring of energy and resources seemed to produce few positive results. As the five-year anniversary of the earthquake approaches, a number of recent books attempt to shed light on this vexing case. What can explain the dire political and economic conditions that have caused so much suffering in Haiti? Why is the Haitian state so weak and its democracy so tenuous? How did the stated goal of the international community to “build back better” meet such utter defeat? Several recent works offer partial answers, highlighting the country’s long history of political violence and economic mismanagement, its flawed constitutional order, or the vagaries of an ineffective and unaccountable international aid system. However, few studies capture the complex array of forces underpinning Haiti’s political development as completely or as lucidly as Robert Fatton’s most recent monograph, Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery.

At its core, Fatton’s argument is an extension of the world-systems analysis of Immanuel Wallerstein. The central conceit of the book is that Haiti, along with a handful of the world’s most impoverished and politically unstable countries, occupies an unenviable new position at the outer limits of the international system—aptly named the outer periphery. According to Fatton, the outer periphery constitutes “a new zone of catastrophe … integrated into the margins of the margin of the global economy” (p. 14). Economically, states in the outer periphery have been pushed to the very bottom of the global production process, where workers are paid ultra-cheap wages and the majority live in abject poverty. Politically, states in the outer periphery may feign electoral democracy, but their governments enjoy extremely limited sovereignty. In reality, according to the author, they are ruled as “virtual trusteeships of the international community … under the surveillance of foreign peacekeepers and under the control of international financial institutions and nongovernmental organizations” (p. 14).

According to this logic, the central actor in Fatton’s analysis is the “self-appointed international community” (p. 1), which has foisted self-serving and destructive neoliberal policies on the states of the outer periphery for the last three decades. Under the guise of aid, the international community has used international lending practices, humanitarian assistance, and multilateral peacekeeping forces to infiltrate markets and dismantle governmental institutions in states like Haiti. Thus, the roots of extreme poverty and state weakness can be traced back to policies imposed by external actors. As he puts it, “the emasculation of the state is not an accident” (p. 100).

Fatton does not place all of the blame on international actors, however. Building on his previous work on the politics of Haiti (which he notably dubbed a “predatory republic”), the author clearly acknowledges the culpability of domestic elites. With remarkable nuance and clarity, he explores how the politics of race and class have combined with material scarcity and an adversarial constitutional system to produce a political elite focused on personal privilege and wealth extraction, rather than the common good of the Haitian people. Harkening back to a previous era of formal colonial rule, Fatton describes contemporary Haitian elites as “collaborators” (p. 26) who subjugate the local population on behalf of the imperial core in pursuit of personal gain. Thus, his analysis ultimately rests at the intersection of international and domestic politics: “It is the interaction between imperial actors and indigenous collaborators resulting in an opportunistic convergence of interests that explains the outer periphery’s obvious dependence on the core” (p. 26).

While the author’s tone may strike some readers as provocative or inflammatory, this is a skillfully crafted book whose arguments merit serious consideration. It is not only an incisive rejoinder to the dominant intellectual discourse about international aid and state failure; it also offers a thought-provoking challenge to policymakers (both Haitian and international) engaged in the reconstruction of Haiti. Indeed, Fatton’s analysis is many things at once—an astute political history of the world’s first black republic, a penetrating indictment of failed international intervention, and a policy manifesto that implores political leaders to radically rethink the neoliberal agenda that continues to dominate Haitian politics. And it is precisely in its ambitious scope and broad reach that the book’s greatest strengths, as well as its principal limitations, can be found.

There is no doubt that this book constitutes a significant contribution to the scholarly literature on Haitian politics and the politics of developing states. More than a narrowly focused case study, it introduces a new and broadly applicable conceptual category, the outer periphery, which comprises some of the world’s most famously troubled states. Fatton challenges the conventional wisdom about places like Somalia, Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Haiti, rejecting the practice of categorizing them as failed or fragile states—terminology that implies internal dysfunction or deficiency as the root cause of their problems. Instead, he turns the state failure paradigm on its head, arguing that a weak or failed state is “unintelligible without studying the profound impact of the world capitalist system on the country’s internal affairs” (p. vii). In this way, he offers a new (if somewhat familiar) conceptual lens that calls into question common assumptions about the causes of state failure—and conventional policy prescriptions for addressing it. Building on this criticism, Fatton questions the wisdom of policymakers and prominent scholars, including Paul Collier and Mats Lundahl, who have publicly advocated for a neoliberal approach to post-earthquake reconstruction and development in Haiti. According to Fatton, it is market fundamentalism and foreign intervention that laid the groundwork for Haiti’s current predicament. What is needed is a radical break with the past that would prioritize the development of domestic markets and sovereign state authority.

Notwithstanding the value of these insights, some notable shortcomings follow from the book’s attempt to engage both academic and policy audiences in a single monograph. In choosing to structure the text without explicit reference to research design, systematic data analysis, or hypothesis testing, the author crafts a cogent and extremely accessible account of Haiti’s political development that will likely appeal to policymakers and others outside of academia. However, in eschewing academic convention in this way, the analysis falls short of its potential in terms of methodological rigor and explanatory power. To be clear, the study is filled with rich data, both qualitative and quantitative. But a more systematic treatment of that data—whether elite interviews, qualitative case studies, or comparative statistical indicators—could help to bolster some of the inferences drawn in the study.

Further, while the study paints a vivid picture of Haiti’s experience in the outer periphery, the theoretical constructs and underlying causal relationships central to the author’s thesis remain somewhat fuzzy. What exactly distinguishes a state in the outer periphery from one in the conventional periphery? It is clear that the degree of economic subjugation and foreign domination is key. But where does one draw the line, and what specific measures might be used to distinguish the tipping point? Similarly, the process by which states descend into (or emerge from) the outer periphery could be usefully elaborated. In the Haitian case, the author details a unique and inauspicious path to political and economic marginalization. However, despite his assertion that Haiti’s experience is representative of a generalizable syndrome afflicting other states in the outer periphery, the study provides surprisingly little detail about how other states at the extreme margins of the world system have reached this point. Given the potential utility of the outer periphery as a conceptual category, this constitutes an area ripe for future research and theory development.