“Faction Terror, Paramilitarism, and Civil War in Haiti: The View from Port-au-Prince, 1994-2004” is an academic article that discusses observations made by J. Christopher Kovats-Bernat in Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti, during the country's violent civil war. The article goes into great detail to discuss the events that led to the civil unrest, taking into account many of the political, economic, and cultural influences that resulted in the 1994 coup and the resulting ten years of extreme violence. The author, however, attempts to investigate the country's bloodshed using the methodology developed by anthropologist Carolyn Nordstrom, who believed that war is not a static event but rather an event that shapes and is shaped by historical, social contexts and cultural. Therefore, Kovats-Bernat attempts to investigate the country's current bloodshed by considering three separate questions; What political advances led to the war, what social aspects characterize the violence of the war, and how did the war affect the daily lives and cultural identities of Haitians? Kovats-Bernat describes the three key concepts she wishes to use in order to carry out such an investigation into the lives of Haitians during the civil war: political history, social analysis of material conditions, and cultural context. However, he does not appear to adequately follow all the definitions he provides for each of these concepts throughout his article, at least not in a way that is concise and easily understood by the reader. Take "cultural context" for example. Kovats-Bernat clearly states that by cultural context he means “individual and communal narratives of violence… within a larger symbolic world… mid-article… the main body of this academic journal primarily discusses the “developments policies that led to the war” (p.123), and thus Kovats-Bernat managed to consider at least one of the three aspects he hoped to discuss. However, he seems lacking when it comes to discussing the other two clearly defined key concepts: exactly that which the author had originally stated would result in ambiguous, subjective and imprecise observations. The author has failed to put an individual or community “face” on the issue, and seems to focus more on history than on ethnography to present Haiti's political history alongside a more in-depth social analysis of material conditions and discussion of cultural context, I would have a much broader basis on which I could express my confidence in the evidence.