Two dozen papers from a colloquium held in Port-au-Prince in June 2014, published to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of Jean-Claude Duvalier's departure. Laënnec Hurbon opens by arguing that dictatorship has been abandoned too quickly as a subject of research, and that a state emerging from one carries its criminal habits forward into what he calls a mimetic democracy. Haitian contributors then examine the machinery: nineteenth century militarism that made arbitrary power acceptable, the use Duvalierist discourse made of Haitian ethnology, the foreign partners who kept François Duvalier in place, the Fiyèt-Lalo whose part in the terror has gone unexamined, and the aid economy that followed the dictatorship. A second group compares how Argentina, Uruguay, Guatemala, South Africa and Germany handled their own pasts. A former justice minister's account of why the case against Duvalier collapsed anchors the section on impunity.