The arduous struggle for a more democratic order in Haiti since the fall of Jean-Claude Duvalier in 1986 has sustained the imperative of an ongoing critique of postcolonial violence. Two recent books in particular delineate the contemporary stakes of this critical constant. Alex Dupuy's The Prophet and the Power: Jean-Bertrand Aristide (2007a) and Peter Hallward's Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (2007) together extensively document the complex and contentious path of the post-Duvalier era in Haitian politics. They describe the invention of a post-authoritarian populist political sequence, one that after 1990 coalesced around the charismatic leadership of a previously unknown Roman Catholic priest, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Both volumes occupy a highly congruent critical terrain; beyond their shared focus on Aristide, both are highly critical of the role of American foreign policy and its systematic attempts to undermine the process of democratization in Haiti. Each is fundamentally supportive of the promise Aristide represented to open the political terrain to the excluded Haitian multitude, and both describe the degree to which North Atlantic neo-liberal policies in the era of globalization have undermined economic and political autonomy in Haiti. They agree as well on the close relation of these policies with the extension of US imperial hegemony, the intensive coalition of the US and the Haitian elite in the attempt to undermine Aristide's progressive social and political reforms, and each condemns the hollow, Potemkin-like destabilization campaign that was the so-called ‘democratic’ opposition to Aristide's second presidency.

Where Hallward parts ways with Dupuy is in the latter's affirmation that it is Aristide himself, along with his Famni Lavalas party, which is to blame for the dismantling of Haitian democracy after 2000:

Hallward rejects Dupuy's unconditional condemnation of Aristide's populism, ironically pointing to the incoherence of this critique in light of Dupuy's celebration of Haitian democracy.