This month (August 2011), United Nations University Press has published Fixing Haiti: MINUSTAH and Beyond, edited by Jorge Heine and Andrew S. Thompson.

Description: Haiti may well be the only country in the Americas with a last name. References to the land of the “black Jacobins” are almost always followed by the phrase “the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere”. To that dubious distinction, on 12 January 2010 Haiti added another, when it was hit by the most devastating natural disaster in the Americas, a 7.0 Richter scale earthquake. More than 220,000 people lost their lives and much of its vibrant capital, Port-au-Prince, was reduced to rubble. Since 2004, the United Nations has been in Haiti through MINUSTAH, in an ambitious attempt to help Haiti raise itself by its bootstraps. This effort has now acquired additional urgency. Is Haiti a failed state? Does it deserve a Marshall-plan-like programme? What will it take to address the Haitian predicament? In this book, some of the world’s leading experts on Haiti examine the challenges faced by the first black republic, the tasks undertaken by the UN, and the new role of hemispheric players such as Argentina, Brazil and Chile, as well as that of Canada, France and the United States.

Jorge Heine is distinguished fellow at the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI); CIGI Chair in Global Governance, Balsillie School of International Affairs; and professor of political science at Wilfrid Laurier University.

Andrew S. Thompson is a senior fellow with the Centre for International Governance Innovation (CIGI) in Waterloo, Canada, and Programme Officer of the Global Governance Programmes at the Balsillie School of International Affairs.

For more information, see http://unu.edu/publications/books/2010-2020/fixing-haiti-minustah-and-beyond