Throwing thousands more soldiers at Haiti will not solve this crisis

In a recent letter to Chad’s national legislature, Chadian President Mahamat Deby announced that his country will be deploying two battalions to Haiti as part of the United Nations’ new Gang Suppression Force (GSF).

Totaling 1,500 troops, the deployments are scheduled to leave this week for Haiti, where they’ll remain for at least one year, working with multilateral partners in an effort to suppress the violence that has come to define life in Haiti today.

Although the GSF represents the most formidable effort to date aimed at resolving the current crisis in Haiti, there is little indication that it will resolve the problems that plagued its predecessor, the Multinational Security Support (MSS). Working exclusively to tame the country’s violence, the MSS failed to solve the other critical challenges Haiti faces, including a disastrous economy and weak governing institutions.

Robert Fatton, a Haiti expert and professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, told Responsible Statecraft that the narrow, security-oriented focus of the GSF will likely lead it to overlook many of the country’s other challenges. And without addressing these other issues, the GSF’s success will be limited.

“The problems that the country is facing now go beyond the violence,” Fatton said. “The question of the legitimacy of the government, the question of the social and political polarization of Haiti. Those things are not addressed in any fashion.”

The Kenyan-led MSS, which was authorized by the United Nations in October 2023, failed to stem the country’s security woes, and did nothing to improve the nation’s social, economic, or political problems. Three years after the program sent hundreds of security personnel to the country, 26 different gangs (half of whose members are children under 18 years old) now control up to 90% of the capital, Port-au-Prince.

With nearly two-thirds of the country’s population living below the poverty line, joining a gang is, for many young men, the easiest way to ensure a livelihood. Meanwhile, it’s unclear if elections scheduled for later this year will even take place after the country’s Provisional Electoral Council indefinitely postponed voter and candidate registration, which was scheduled to start on April 1.

According to Fatton, the international community has a history of forcing “elections [in Haiti] under conditions that are not conducive to really legitimate elections. I don’t see, even if the new force is capable of imposing some order, how you can have an election this year or early next year. I think this will literally generate another major political crisis in the country.”

The MSS mission was also marred by reports that Kenyan security personnel not only failed to stop sexual violence in the country, but committed their own acts of rape. A U.N. report accuses members of the MSS of being involved in several cases of sexual exploitation in Haiti.

Instead of rethinking the viability of the mission, which is just one in a long line of failed external peacekeeping missions over the course of recent history in Haiti, the United States and Panama helped to pass a new U.N. resolution establishing the GSF.

Passed in September 2025, the resolution creates an initial 12-month program under which an anticipated 5,500 international troops are to be deployed to the country. In addition, 50 civilian supervisors will join the mission on the ground. In addition to Chad’s troops, Guatemala plans to double its current 300-personnel contingent in Haiti, and Sri Lanka is sending an undisclosed amount of troops as part of a combat unit. Argentina, for its part, will send military engineers to establish a hospital in the country.

But many Haiti experts don’t believe this rebrand is likely to fix the country’s many woes, in part because its mandate is limited to the security sphere, whereas many of the country’s challenges include economic, political, and social turmoil.

Fatton told Responsible Statecraft that “the problems in Haiti are so massive.”

“The first order of business is taming the violence, but then, what are you going to do about the political economy of Haiti? What are you going to do about poverty? What are you going to do about the degree of inequality?,” he charged. “All of those things have nurtured the rise of the gangs. So if you don’t resolve that, the gangs will reappear, and nothing will have changed.”

In an interview with Responsible Statecraft, Jake Johnston, director of international research at the Center for Economic and Policy Research and author of the book Aid State: Elite Panic, Disaster Capitalism, and the Battle to Control Haiti," said that the countries involved in Haiti’s mission openly admit that “force alone is not enough.” Johnston criticizes these international security missions more generally for missing the real challenges the country faces, saying “I don’t think these missions are the right approach, period.”

On the GSF, Johnston says, “this is not a proposal to provide Haiti with development or to address root causes. It is a security mission whose goal is to go and kill people.” Johnston says that at best, the GSF is “providing a stop-gap solution” that helps support the “inherently unsustainable status quo.”

Fatton said he would like to see an international mission whose focus is “geared towards the agricultural transformation of Haiti,” in order to improve “food production for the local population.” If you don’t do this, Fatton says you’ll continue having an issue with violence and poor food security leading to “massive migration to the urban areas,” despite there being “no jobs in the urban areas. All of that nurtures drug trafficking, [and] it nurtures the gangs.”

Despite its purported improvements, the GSF is in many ways just a larger MSS — rebranded but still focused on armed security. With half of Haiti’s gang members being children under 18, with poverty ravaging the country, and with political institutions powerless in the face of a broken social contract, the GSF’s focus on military operations seems to be largely missing the crux of much of Haiti’s challenges.