Rethinking Statelessness from Within episode’ to assess theories that ‘may be generalisable to other events’,28 as I hope to achieve with the concept of de facto statelessness within Haiti. This approach allows for a detailed examination of this historical and ongoing episode, asserting that the application of de facto statelessness to my core events, the 2010 earthquake and democratic breakdown post-2016, is demonstrative of a loss of community, voting and citizenship fulfilment. I contend that the theoretical concept of de facto statelessness provides a human-centric framework for understanding the profound disempowerment and lack of citizenship experienced by the Haitian populace. In 1804, Haitians were one of the first to successfully liberate themselves, yet centuries of colonial revivals, Western interventions and a stark class system wherein Haiti’s capitalist class expropriate the resources of the nation in favour of Western capital, restricting the rural classes from social mobility means citizenship expression is effectively curtailed.29 The foundations for the political and economic conditions which hollow out the expression of citizenship have long been explored by Haitian academics. Fatton interrogates how exclusion and precarity are reproduced within Haiti, most especially post-2010 earthquake in his book, Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery. 30 To be referenced further throughout this article, Fatton explores how elite capture and socio-political inequality have created a system where formal citizenship is degraded by informal power structures and eventuating in a system of state trusteeship.31 Fatton explores many of the phenomena impacting modern Haiti; he found that ‘syndromes of political dysfunctionality ranging from fragile domestic security, continued constitutional uncertainties, foreign military usurpation of national sovereignty, and total disconnect between international perceptions and local understandings of the nation’s realities’ are demonstrative of a ‘typical outer peripheral state’.32 Fatton’s approach in his book focusses on the internal structures that have led to external trusteeship. 33 These factors provide the structural foundations for the conditions of de facto statelessness I am exploring. With the effect of colonialism and systems of state trusteeship in mind, I explore how the 2010 earthquake represents a key event in current degradation of citizenship fulfilment in Haiti. Writing in light of the Cold War, Dupuy’s Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution speaks similarly to how the precarity within Haiti is shaped by international donors, political instability and systemic dysfunctions, thereby undermining effective democratic participation and state accountability.34 Beginning Chapter One, Dupuy highlights Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide’s ‘landslide’ electoral victory, followed by his eventual overthrow, thus becoming the ‘twenty-eighth coup d’état since Haiti gained its independence in 1804 and the fifth since the emerging popular movement impelled the military to overthrow the hereditary Duvalier dictatorship in 1986’. 35 Illustrative of the 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 Andrew Bennett and Alexander L George, Case Studies and Theory Development in the Social Sciences (MIT Press 2005) 5. Patrick Sylvain, ‘Review: Haiti: Trapped in the Outer Periphery. By Robert Fatton Jr.’ (2025) 20(2) Journal of Haitian Studies 227, 230. Fatton (n 7). ibid 58. ibid 155. See, eg, ibid 59. Alex Dupuy, Haiti in the New World Order: The Limits of the Democratic Revolution (Routledge, 2nd ed, 2018) ch 1, 27, 106 (‘Dupuy, Haiti in the New World Order’). ibid 1. 131