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For millions of Haitians, daily life is defined not only by insecurity, but by constant negotiation. Movement, work, and access to basic services often depend on arrangements with criminal armed actors who control territory and resources. These dynamics point to a deeper reality: Violence in Haiti is embedded in governance mechanisms that organise and rule everyday life.
Efforts to restore a minimum level of security are therefore both necessary and urgent. The deployment of the Gang Suppression Force (GSF) reflects this imperative. Mandated by the UN Security Council in September 2025, the GSF replaces the earlier Multinational Security Support mission with a UN-authorised multinational force of up to 5,500 personnel, deployed for an initial 12-month period.
As new UN force set to tackle gangs, Haitians speak of exhaustion and hopelessness
Among the displaced, there’s little confidence the UN’s Gang Suppression Force will be anything but yet another pointless foreign intervention.
Its mandate includes conducting intelligence-led counter-gang operations, securing strategic sites and transport corridors, and contributing to the conditions necessary for stabilisation and the organisation of elections.
These efforts matter, but the persistence and evolution of violence point to a deeper challenge.
The political economy of violence
In the past few years, gang violence has displaced more than 1.4 million people, caused high levels of acute food insecurity, rising sexual violence, and lack of access to basic services, health and education.
But criminal groups in Haiti are not insurgents. They are entrenched within governance mechanisms that connect political authority, economic interests, and illicit markets. As a recent Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC)’s policy report indicates, they function as brokers: critical nodes controlling access to territory, resources, and populations within a broader political economy of violence.
This brokerage system is not new in Haiti. Political power has long been exercised through layered networks of intermediaries and operators – some violent, others not – who regulate access, distribute resources, and facilitate political action. Violent non-state actors have often operated as extensions of political authority and elite power.
A broker accumulates power by becoming indispensable to all actors in the system, to provide a service: access to a neighbourhood, to a port, to an administration, to a population for a vote, to a political candidate or a more violent service – conquering a region, repressing a mobilisation, or winning an election. The more central the brokers are, the more difficult they become to bypass.
Violence plays a key role in sustaining this position. It compels other actors to engage with gang leaders for the system to function.
This is the logic underpinning extortion: In exchange for payments, gangs enable the circulation of goods or the functioning of critical infrastructure, such as ports. When these arrangements are challenged, violence is used to reassert control, for example through blockades or targeted attacks, until the terms of exchange are restored. The objective is not to disrupt or overthrow the system, but to secure the most strategic and profitable position within it.
This is what gives them resilience. It also explains why addressing the crisis requires more than weakening criminal groups; it requires unstitching them from the political fabric in which they are interwoven.
A questionable security approach
Bridging this gap requires recognising the nature of Haiti’s political-criminal crisis and designing interventions that dismantle the alliances that sustain it: the funds gangs receive, the financial circuits they exploit, the weapons and drugs they traffic, and the patronage networks that protect or use them.
Without addressing corruption structures, for example, law enforcement remains a revolving door: arrests or eliminations may occur, but the system that enables criminal governance endures.
This latter dimension remains largely absent from national and international crisis response strategies. By failing to account for the political economy of violence, particularly the importance of addressing politico-criminal relationships, current policies risk perpetuating rather than loosening the links between armed groups and the political system, especially if the elections scheduled for 2026 proceed without a more comprehensive response adapted to the complexity of the crisis.
Current responses only partially engage with this reality. Security operations, including those supported by drone capabilities and private military contractors such as Erik Prince and his company Vectus Global, have achieved tactical gains in certain areas. But these gains remain fragile and raise important questions regarding accountability and civilian protection. According to a March 2026 Human Rights Watch investigation, at least 1,243 people were killed and 738 injured between March 2025 and January 2026 as a result of drone strikes in Haiti, including dozens of civilians and children.
While restoring security is imperative, the current trajectory risks deepening cycles of violence, eroding trust in state institutions, and blurring the line between law enforcement and abuse.
Additionally, between March 2025 and January 2026, UN human rights monitors documented at least 3,301 people killed and 1,691 injured during security operations against gangs in Haiti. The figures reveal a troubling reality: more than one in five victims struck in their homes or in the streets. Such levels of harm point not only to the intensity of the confrontations, but to patterns of force that appear, in many cases, unnecessary or disproportionate.
Concerns extend beyond the battlefield. Over the same period, the UN recorded 247 additional incidents outside formal anti-gang operations, resulting in nearly 200 deaths. Allegations include summary executions by police units and local authorities, including a prosecutor reportedly linked to dozens of killings of suspected gang members.
These dynamics underscore a dilemma: While restoring security is imperative, the current trajectory risks deepening cycles of violence, eroding trust in state institutions, and blurring the line between law enforcement and abuse.
More fundamentally, a predominantly security approach does not address the structures that sustain violence. A more coherent approach requires a clearer diagnosis and a more deliberate sequencing of interventions.
Transforming the system
A long-term crisis resolution strategy must integrate justice, economic policy, security, and political reform. Framed in these terms, the debate moves beyond the reductive question of whether to negotiate with gangs. The central issue becomes how to sequence justice, demobilisation, accountability, and reintegration in a manner that disrupts, rather than reproduces, the structural drivers of violence.
To be effective, the GSF must be paired with judicial tools capable of targeting gang support networks, particularly financial ones, and not only armed actors. This includes pursuing criminal leaders as well as their political and financial sponsors, strengthening investigative and judicial capacities to address corruption and collusion, and targeting financial flows and drugs and firearms trafficking networks. Only by addressing the broader ecosystem of collusion can Haiti move away from a political order that is shaped by deep-rooted politico-criminal relationships.
At the same time, there is a need to develop pathways that go beyond repression alone. Discussions on disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration (DDR) and community violence reduction (CVR) have re-emerged since the one-year renewal of the mandate of the United Nations Political Mission in Haiti (BINUH), in January 2026, and the reinstallation of the National Commission for Disarmament, Dismantlement and Reintegration (CNDDR in French) in February 2026.
Yet current policy debates remain marked by conceptual vagueness and a striking lack of institutional memory, and when implemented no consolidated, systematic review has been undertaken to assess their outcomes, limitations, and political implications.
In the absence of such grounding, renewed calls for DDR or CVR risk being politically instrumentalised, poorly sequenced, or disconnected from the contemporary political economy of violence. What is required is not a return to generic frameworks, but the articulation of a clear, forward-looking strategic roadmap that defines core principles, establishes credible sequencing options, and identifies realistic policy pathways adapted to Haiti’s current context.
At its core, this implies structuring a coherent relationship between criminal justice, demobilisation, and reintegration processes. A differentiated approach is essential. It should combine the prosecution of individuals responsible for serious crimes with transitional justice mechanisms that can enable negotiated surrender under strict conditions. Conditional amnesties may be considered for lower-level actors not implicated in grave violations, alongside structured DDR and rehabilitation programmes.
Such an approach must also recognise the internal composition of armed groups. Haiti does not face homogeneous criminal entities, but layered organisations in which leadership coexists with large numbers of kids. A viable strategy must therefore clearly separate leadership figures, who should be subject to targeted judicial responses, from rank-and-file members, many of whom require access to education, psychosocial support, and alternative livelihoods.
The challenge is not only to reduce violence, but to transform the system that produces it. This is a complex and long-term undertaking. It demands sustained engagement, coordination across actors, and a willingness to address sensitive political and economic dynamics. Without it, the structures that sustain violence will continue to adapt and endure, and the prospect of lasting stability in Haiti will remain out of reach.
