Sociologist, Jean Casimir has taught at the Faculty of Human Sciences of the State University of Haiti (UEH) since 2001. Since 2013 , he has contributed to the summer courses of the Roosevelt University College of the University of Utrecht, in the Netherlands , organized in collaboration with the Center for Global Studies and the Humanities . from Duke University in the United States .

A former official of the Secretariat of the United Nations (UN) and of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), from 1970 to 1985, he was part of the Provisional Electoral Council of Haiti (1990-1991) and represented his country as Plenipotentiary Ambassador to the United States of America and as Permanent Representative to the Organization of American States (OAS) from 1991 to 1997.

What is meant by Haitian revolution? ? The answer depends on where you start from. Famous heroes of the revolution, Toussaint L'Ouverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines and Henry Christophe, who rose up against France 's management of the island, but without questioning the form of nation-state they wanted to create ? Or of the first president of Haiti after the assassination of Dessalines, Alexandre Pétion, and his policy of conciliation with the French government ? Well, it so happens that Casimir does not start from either place ; but from the power and beauty of the sovereign people. (…) (I ) f you start with the heroes and keep silent about the sovereign people, you are right in the middle of the colonial politics of knowledge. If you shift the geography of reasoning and let it be guided by what moves you, you engage in the expanding process of a decolonial politics of knowledge, of feeling, of believing. Beyond the official stories to which we are accustomed and where proper names (those I mentioned) resonate, there are the silences of the past (to borrow Michel- Rolph 's apt phrase ) Trouillot ) : the beauty of the sovereign people. This is precisely where Casimir begins .

Walter D. Mignolo

The colonial and racist state of modern times , within which the Haitian people emerged , excluded any popular participation. (…) The civil service that took over in 1804 displayed a contempt for the knowledge and practices of the people, identical to that of the modern state, but without being able to gag them, influence them, modify them, and even less claim to eradicate them , despite its plethora of laws and regulations (…). The colonial state and the state of the 19th century did not manage the community of Haitians considered as an organic entity linked by the institutions of its own civil society. (…) During the 19th century , governments did not modify economic and social life and had no influence on the production and management of the economic surplus .