Johnston follows more than a decade of foreign money into Haiti and comes back with a different question than he set out with. Tracking the roughly ten billion dollars pledged after the January 2010 earthquake through contracting databases and NGO reports, he found he could learn more from an office in Washington about the reconstruction than Haitians could on the ground, and that the deeper puzzle was not where the funds went but why.

His answer is the aid state: a governing arrangement in which Haitian institutions answer to donors and a small domestic elite rather than to Haitians, the latest in two centuries of outside attempts to manage the country. He traces it from the militarized relief operation of 2010 through the assassination of Jovenel Moise and the international backing of an unelected prime minister.

Talk of a failed state, he argues, obscures the point. Intervention never paused; the only real choice is whether it continues.