Niño and González use process tracing to ask what motivated the hiring of mercenaries to remove Haiti's increasingly authoritarian president. Tracing that question back through the country's history, they map the points at which crime and political institutions grew into one another.

What they describe is a phantom state: a political structure that exists in name but has been supplanted in practice, its authority contested by rival groups until state presence became limited, fragmented, delegated, and authoritarian. Force is no longer the state's alone; it is parceled out among competing oligopolies of violence, with state institutions serving as machinery for criminal organizations to hold territory and take profit.

On this account Jovenel Moïse had allied his government with the strongest gangs while weakening political groups and criminal rivals, and the mercenaries became the instrument for breaking that grip. The killing, the authors conclude, followed a plan by political leaders acting with judicial complicity to check the concentration of executive power.