Haiti: The Abrupt Transition from the Duvalier Dictatorship to the Dictatorship of 'Haitian-Style Civil Society'

The established expression of 'democratic transition' applied to Haiti since 1986 is less a matter of political analysis than of incantation. It presupposes a movement, a will, a normative horizon towards which an authoritarian system would have gradually dissolved to make way for a democratic order under construction. However, this narrative does not withstand rigorous examination of the facts. Haiti has neither experienced nor truly attempted a transition to democracy. What occurred in 1986 was not a regime change in the political sense of the term, but a simple shift in the center of gravity of domination, from the embodied dictatorial state to a constellation of fragmented, socially selective, and economically predatory civil powers. This is what I refer to as 'Haitian-style civil society,' an arrangement of small groups and sectoral networks sharing domination over key sectors of the nation, including sovereign functions, to the detriment of state institutions which they bypass, weaken, or neutralize. The fall of the Duvaliers ended a personal, familial, and military-administrative dictatorship, but it did not lead to a refoundation of the state. The structures of domination were not dismantled; they were redistributed. Authoritarianism changed form without changing function. The brutal verticality of Duvalierist power was succeeded by an apparent, equally constraining horizontality, in which political decision-making is dispersed among unelected actors, not accountable to the electorate, and largely opaque in their operations. The state then ceases to act as a decision-making center and functions as a space for capture. 'Haitian-style civil society' is not on the fringes of power. It constitutes its structural lining. It operates according to a policy of substitution: it does not exercise formal government but invests the state apparatus by placing ministers, general directors, and high-ranking officials chosen less for their institutional competence than for their implicit loyalty. These pawns act more as network relays than as public service agents. Their autonomy remains conditioned by adherence to informal instructions. When they attempt to restore institutional logic, fully exercise their authority, or break with established arrangements, they are publicly disavowed, politically isolated, or quickly removed. This mode of operation maintains the state in a situation of chronic paralysis. Institutions legally exist but are deprived of the capacity for initiative. Political responsibility dissolves because effective power lies outside constitutional channels, within networks that are accountable neither to Parliament, nor to citizens, nor to an identifiable administrative hierarchy. Failure no longer appears as a governance accident but as a structural given of a system where visible power holders do not control its levers, while real power holders remain off-stage. The political economy of this arrangement clarifies its stability. Public resources, already limited, are caught between internal predation and external dependence. The Public Treasury no longer functions as an instrument of sovereignty but as an adjustment variable in an ecosystem dominated by international funding. These funds, far from consolidating the state, contribute to its circumvention. They fuel governance through projects, emergencies, and temporary mechanisms, replacing public planning with a fragmented, contractualized, and largely externalized administration. 'Haitian-style civil society' establishes itself as an indispensable intermediary between international money and a population kept at a distance from any collective decision-making capacity. In this configuration, the electoral question loses its structuring function. Elections no longer serve to arbitrate societal projects but to endorse previously negotiated balances. In certain cases, and with the active or tacit complicity of foreign governments, 'Haitian-style civil society' participates in defining the scope of political possibility, de facto deciding who can access the presidency of the Republic and who is excluded. Popular sovereignty is thus framed, filtered, and neutralized in the name of stability, security, or international respectability. To speak of an 'endless transition,' as is often articulated, therefore amounts to maintaining an analytical fiction. It is not an unfinished process, but an absent process. Since 1986, Haiti has evolved within a normalized state of exception, where illegitimacy becomes the rule of operation and instability a technique of government. Constitutions succeed one another without producing an effective state. Democratic discourses proliferate while mechanisms of domination recompose and refine themselves. Democracy circulates as vocabulary, never as political architecture. Ultimately, the break of 1986 marks less Haiti's entry into a democratic order than the opening of a more diffuse, fragmented, and harder-to-define cycle of domination. The Duvalier dictatorship was exercised through a centralized power, whose violence stemmed from a clear chain of command. That of 'Haitian-style civil society' thrives in ambiguity, irresponsibility, and moral dilution. Faced with systemic, massive, and cumulative ills, Haiti can no longer be satisfied with procedural formulas or abstract ideals. The situation calls for the emergence of a re-centralized, disciplined, and strategic state power, endowed with real authority, but framed by institutional rationality, a modern vision of public administration, and a clear goal of national reconstruction. Not a return to arbitrariness, but the affirmation of a semi-authoritarian, enlightened, and functional state, capable of making decisions, imposing rules, restoring sovereignty, and reordering the political landscape. To deep pathologies, Haiti can only oppose remedies of the same magnitude. Pennsylvania, December 17, 2025

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Jean Venel Casséus is a journalist, holding a master's degree in defense and security of the Americas. He is notably the author of a work dedicated to the geopolitics of the sacred, titled 'Au nom de Dieu'.