Killing with Kindness

Mark Schuller

ISBN 10: 0813553636 / ISBN 13: 9780813553634

Published by Rutgers University Press, 2012

About this Item

pp. 254 Index.

Seller Inventory # 2697183302

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Killing with Kindness
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0813553636
• ISBN 13: 9780813553634
• Binding: Soft cover
• Condition: New

About this title

Synopsis

Winner of the 2015 Margaret Mead Award from the American Anthropological Association and the Society for Applied Anthropology

After Haiti’s 2010 earthquake, over half of U.S. households donated to thousands of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in that country. Yet we continue to hear stories of misery from Haiti. Why have NGOs failed at their mission?

Set in Haiti during the 2004 coup and aftermath and enhanced by research conducted after the 2010 earthquake, Killing with Kindness analyzes the impact of official development aid on recipient NGOs and their relationships with local communities. Written like a detective story, the book offers rich ethnographic comparisons of two Haitian women’s NGOs working in HIV/AIDS prevention, one with public funding (including USAID), the other with private European NGO partners. Mark Schuller looks at participation and autonomy, analyzing donor policies that inhibit these goals. He focuses on NGOs’ roles as intermediaries in “gluing” the contemporary world system together and shows how power works within the aid system as these intermediaries impose interpretations of unclear mandates down the chain—a process Schuller calls “trickle-down imperialism.”

About the Author

MARK SCHULLER is an assistant professor of anthropology and NGO Leadership Development at Northern Illinois University. A writer for Huffington Post, he is the coeditor of four books, including Tectonic Shifts: Haiti since the Earthquake, and codirector of the documentary film Poto Mitan:Haitian Women, Pillars of the Global Economy.