The Economic Equation of Viv Ansanm: When Haitian Gangs Apply the Shapley Value

Born at the turn of February and March 2024 from the union of the G9 and G-Pèp, the “Viv Ansanm” alliance ended a war of attrition between gangs in order to maximize criminal excess profits and coordinate large-scale offensives against state infrastructure. The coalition architecture that gave it its strength is now breeding its weaknesses: disputes over sharing, internal “tolls” on corridors, idiosyncratic deviations, and overexposure to repression. Drawing on coalition theory and a body of empirical evidence from 2024–2025, this article offers an economic reading of its likely trajectory.

What a criminal coalition changes

The starting intuition is simple: when constant fighting destroys rent, a coalition can recreate it through coordination. In late February and early March 2024, “Viv Ansanm” emerged precisely to turn the page on a circular conflict. According to the Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project (ACLED), gang-on-gang violence rose by 79% between 2021 and 2022, with more than 500 deaths reported in 2022. This war of attrition was costly for all involved.

In the weeks that followed, repeated attacks targeted the National Palace, the airport, and police stations, while a territorial push toward logistics hubs forced the state to fight on ever more fronts. Viv Ansanm has launched at least 10 major attacks on the National Palace since early March 2024. In mid-2025, Viv Ansanm stormed the police station and the prison in Mirebalais, freeing some 500 prisoners, a concrete demonstration of the coalition’s capacity to act beyond the metropolitan area.

The coalition now controls 85% of Port-au-Prince, a figure that anchors the analysis in a political economy of territorial scarcity. The consequences for security as a whole were immediate: 5,601 people killed by armed violence in 2024, more than 1,000 more than in 2023, along with a collapse in mobility and a rise in internal displacement.

In other words, the coalition did not “pacify”; it re-optimized violence in the service of an expanded criminal rent.

The Shapley logic: create a surplus, then share it

Why does the coalition hold? Because it produces a surplus beyond what each gang achieved on its own. Coalition theory, in its canonical formulation by Lloyd S. Shapley (1953), provides an instrument: the Shapley value, which assigns each member its share of the collective surplus according to its marginal contribution to all possible coalitions.

Two properties matter here: the additivity of the surplus when resources are complementary (weapons, fighters, checkpoints, port access), and discipline through the promise of a “fair” payoff for those who respect coordination. In a repeated game (Fudenberg & Tirole, 1991), this promise remains credible as long as the expected gains from the coalition exceed the “threat payoff” of going it alone.

Applied to “Viv Ansanm,” this means that the gang that locks down a bottleneck does not keep the rent from the “tolls” to itself; it passes a share on to the allies that back it. As long as this redistribution is expected to be enforced, the coalition remains in the core (the set of allocations that discourage any secession).

The consolidation of the Viv Ansanm alliance allowed the gangs to concentrate their resources on criminal activity and on confronting the security forces rather than on infighting. A measurable result: between March and August 2024, gang violence occurred in nearly 100 neighborhoods of the Port-au-Prince arrondissement, a 20% increase over the previous six months.

The problem arises when events or shocks shift actual marginal contributions away from what the implicit schedule pays for: that is what triggers friction.

Endogenous frictions: idiosyncratic deviations and corridor “hold-ups”

Idiosyncratic deviation

On 6–7 December 2024, the Wharf Jérémie gang, led by Monel “Mikano” Félix (a member of the alliance), ordered a massacre of more than 207 people in Cité Soleil, targeting many elderly people accused of “witchcraft” after the leader’s child fell ill.

Economically, this is the textbook case of a private use of coalition resources (men, ammunition, time) that generates no common rent: an action the allies can neither prevent nor monetize, but which eats into the collective “coercion budget” and damages the alliance’s brand. Sanctioning this kind of deviation is costly: who bears the cost of punishment, and on what verifiable basis? The inability to turn this shock into public punishment signals a lack of internal governance mechanisms.

Corridor hold-up

Other deviations, by contrast, reflect cold rationality: capturing more rent by renegotiating the implicit terms of the split. Between 26 and 29 January 2025, Viv Ansanm launched multiple attacks on Kenscoff, aiming to take control of the area and secure access to the South-East. This violence left 262 dead and displaced more than 3,000 people between January and March.

Yet once the corridor is conquered, the groups posted at the checkpoints become gatekeepers able to impose “internal tolls” on their allies. Every gang advance leads to the creation of local cells, one of whose main tasks is to set up a local extortion regime. From then on, the previous sharing schedule falls outside the core: those who control the corridor capture greater relative value, and the others demand a revision.

Strategic overexposure and exogenous shocks

The coalition also over-optimized its visibility. From March 2024 onward, its spectacular attacks triggered an international rebalancing. In May 2025, the United States officially designated Viv Ansanm a transnational terrorist organization, and in July 2025 the UN Security Council added Viv Ansanm to its sanctions list. These measures raise transaction costs: arms purchases, laundering channels, cross-border logistics.

The equation tightens: the higher and more visible the rent, the more repression raises the coalition’s marginal cost, until the threat payoff of defection becomes competitive again.

The same mechanism applies to projecting force beyond the capital. The attack on Mirebalais, the seizure of the prison, and the mass breakout extended the coalition’s footprint… but widened the theater of repression. In September 2025, the offensive toward Arcahaie revealed an even costlier logic: Viv Ansanm chose to go through Laboderie as its approach corridor, trying to recruit the local population by force to swell its ranks before the attack. When the residents refused, the coalition carried out a punitive massacre (more than 40 dead) before pressing on toward its target.

This sequence (a geographic detour, failed forced recruitment, a massacre that gained nothing) perfectly illustrates what economists call “rising recruitment costs.” A stable coalition would have negotiated, bought loyalties, or found other routes in. The immediate resort to mass killing, followed by the pursuit of a costly offensive, signals a logic under time pressure that can no longer afford normal transaction costs. As the coalition opens more fronts, it multiplies points of friction, internal and external.

Institutions, knowledge, and terror: when the university becomes a target

A coalition that wants to last seeks profitable discretion; “Viv Ansanm” has often preferred a show of force. In 2024, Viv Ansanm vandalized and set fire to the premises of the Faculties of Science, Linguistics, Agronomy, and Medicine of the State University of Haiti.

Beyond the emotion, there is a political-economy logic at work: neutralizing the places that reproduce symbolic authority and the cognitive resources (doctors, engineers, pharmacists) that allow the state to rebuild itself. This symbolic violence, costly in terms of international reputation, pays little in immediate rent, but it signals the power to do harm and shifts expectations.

International lessons: why some coalitions hold and others fragment

Comparative history sheds light on the Haitian situation. The Italian mafias have tried two architectures: vertical (Cosa Nostra, ’Ndrangheta) and horizontal (Camorra). The former have coordinating bodies and enforceable rules for sharing between families; they keep “ordinary” homicides under better control and are more resilient to repressive shocks. The polycentric Camorra forms and dissolves fluid coalitions, with less predictable violence.

“Viv Ansanm” sits between these models: a central leadership (Chérizier) but powerful peripheral barons who retain their autonomy. The literature on the sociology of criminal organizations (Catino, 2014–2019) confirms that verticality favors discipline and arbitration, while horizontality maximizes speed of adaptation, but at the price of chronic instability.

The Central American maras (MS-13/Barrio 18) have never consolidated a lasting coalition of the “Viv Ansanm” type. The reason is structural: segmentation into cliques and the absence of a central command produce a federated network, robust to decapitation but unable to generate the super-rents that require heavy coordination.

Finally, the Colombian cartels are a reminder of the risk of self-destruction through over-coordination: as Medellín synchronized its flows (in the 1980s), visibility brought on existential repression; the coalition fragmented when the costs of confronting the state exceeded the benefits of the hyper-rent.

Scenarios for Haiti: three trajectories and a tipping point

Scenario A: competitive fragmentation (the Mexican model)

If coordination costs keep rising (sanctions, international pressure, dwindling ammunition) and if the implicit sharing schedules fail to reflect actual marginal contributions, then the coalition leaves the core: subcoalitions and splits. The perverse effect: fewer spectacular attacks, but violence that spreads and predation that grows more erratic. The signals are there: quarrels over checkpoints, local purges, the rise of micro-chiefdoms.

Scenario B: stabilized territorialization (the ’Ndrangheta model)

The coalition becomes routinized: fewer symbolic attacks, more discreet extraction (systematic taxation of trade, arbitration of disputes, imposed “protection”). A necessary condition: stronger verticality (an arbitration body, a quasi-formal sharing schedule, graduated and credible sanctions). The Italian precedents show that this path requires criminal rules and institutions, a paradox for Haitian gangs born of the opportunism of urban warfare.

Scenario C: transitional negotiation

Episodes abroad (El Salvador, Italy) show that a state can bargain for a reduction in violence in exchange for limited judicial concessions. But the UN designation and certain legal classifications (terrorism) raise the political cost of such a trade-off. Moreover, a heterogeneous coalition makes any agreement’s credibility fragile: excluding factions produces schisms.

Beyond these three paths, a Brazilian-style hybrid (parallel governance, zone by zone) is possible: territorial segmentation, channels of negotiation with parts of the administration, the normalization of a de facto criminal order. It maximizes local rent but locks in a permanent social cost.

Decisive variables

As ACLED observes, “Viv Ansanm is likely to endure as long as it faces the shared threat of an international security force.” But four critical variables will determine its trajectory:

• Internal cohesion: The more the sharing mechanisms deteriorate, the more likely fragmentation becomes. Beyond a critical threshold, the “defection value” exceeds the “cooperation value.”

• Intensity of repression: Moderate pressure strengthens cohesion, but massive repression triggers fragmentation. The Kenyan mission and the sanctions are creating this critical pressure.

• Economic alternatives: The more the formal economy recovers, the more easily peripheral gangs can leave the alliance. Conversely, deterioration deepens dependence on criminal rents.

• International pressure: Sanctions change the cost-benefit equation. If they make operations impossible, they push toward fragmentation.

By way of conclusion: a narrow window

“Viv Ansanm” is not a sociological riddle; it is an economic equation. Through coordination, it turned costly rivalries into super-rents; it is now stumbling over how to share them, because marginal contributions are shifting faster than the implicit sharing schedules.

In the short term, the coalition can hold as long as the external threat feeds a reflex to close ranks. But every unpunished idiosyncratic massacre, every checkpoint that changes hands, every spectacular attack that invites a better-equipped response brings the alliance closer to the point where the costs of coordination exceed the benefits.

Coalition theory does not say when the tipping point will come; it shows where to act to hasten it at the least social cost: on rents, on bottlenecks, and on deviations. That is where, quite prosaically, the future of a coalition that has already moved beyond its optimal window of stability will be decided.

The history of criminal coalitions teaches that there is a narrow “window of stability”: coordinated enough to generate super-rents, but not so visible as to trigger existential repression. With its spectacular attacks on the National Palace and its designation as a terrorist organization, Viv Ansanm seems to have crossed that red line.

For policymakers, this analytical framework suggests that exploiting internal contradictions could prove more effective than head-on confrontation. Understanding the underlying economic mechanisms can open new avenues for action without generating the massive social costs of the fragmentation observed elsewhere.