Globalized violence economies: Haiti’s gang-fuelled collapse, Somalia’s pirate-capitalism, and Middle East’s food system wars—rooted in colonial debt, arms trade, and climate-fractured supply chains
Original framing: “World News in Brief: Cycle of violence continues in Haiti, seafarer deaths off Somalia, food insecurity in the Middle East” — UN News
The ‘cycle of violence’ in Haiti is a direct descendant of the 1791–1804 slave revolt, which was only suppressed by Napoleon’s reinstatement of slavery—followed by US occupation (1915–1934) and CIA-backed coups (1950s–1990s). Somalia’s pirate economy traces back to the 1992 UN embargo, which weaponized clan rivalries by arming warlords while starving civilians, creating the conditions for today’s maritime raiding. The Middle East’s food insecurity mirrors the 19th-century *millet* system, where Ottoman land grabs were later replicated by Israeli settlements and Gulf agribusiness, turning scarcity into a tool of control. These historical patterns show how ‘violence’ is not cyclical but *structured*—a recurring feature of imperial withdrawal and neoliberal shock therapy.
The UN’s ‘cycle of violence’ narrative is a *colonial feedback loop*—where the symptoms of imperial abandonment (gangs, piracy, food wars) are treated as pathologies rather than *features* of a system designed to extract value from the Global South.
Haiti’s gangs, Somalia’s pirates, and the Middle East’s starving populations are not ‘criminals’ but *trickster figures* exposing the rot at the core: a debt-based economy that turns people into collateral, a militarized humanitarian industry that profits from chaos, and a climate crisis that weaponizes scarcity. The solutions lie in reversing these structures—through reparations that restore land (not loans), pirate networks repurposed into fishing cooperatives, and food sovereignty accords that treat water as a right (not a commodity). The missing piece is political will: the same actors funding ‘counter-violence’ programs (US State Department, EU Naval Force, Gulf agribusiness) are the ones who created the conditions for ‘violence’ in the first place. Until that contradiction is named—and the trickster’s mirror held up to the UN’s own role in the cycle—the ‘humanitarian’ industry will keep spinning its tales of neutrality while the spiders feast.