On January 12, 2010, as this book entered the final stages of production, Haiti was struck with a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions, the latest in a long series of catastrophes that have afflicted the nation and its people. The epicenter of the 7.0 magnitude earthquake was mere kilometers southwest of the nation’s capital, Port-au-Prince, where the ethnographic research discussed in this book was conducted. Between 1995 and 2000 I worked with survivors of human rights abuses from the 1991-94 coup years and studied the interveners that attempted to rehabilitate them as part of my project analyzing the role of humanitarian and development assistance in postconflict reconstruction. Current estimates are that 80 percent of the capital has been destroyed.

David Miliband, the Foreign Secretary for the United Kingdom from 2007 to 2010, will join CIS as a Robert E. Wilhelm Fellow in residence; Rabia Mehmood, a journalist in the Lahore bureau of Express 24/7 Television in Pakistan, has received the 2010-11 Elizabeth Neuffer Fellowship; A year-long study in six countries has found that the goals of U.N. Security Council Resolution 1325, enacted 10 years ago, have not been fulfilled and that implementation is generally poor; CIS, along with The European Medicines Agency (EMA) and MIT's Center for Biomedical Innovation (CBI), is launching a collaborative research project with a focus on enhancing regulatory science in pharmaceuticals.