An email list carries Haiti petitions for eight years

By the time Parham finished her fieldwork, an email list known as the Corbett List had been running for eight years and included some of the most influential leaders of the Haitian diaspora. Human rights advocates used it to circulate petitions and to gather support for changes in Haiti. Word of the list travelled along ties that already joined advocacy workers, academics and missionaries, and those ties held it together. She sets it beside a website forum that produced an organisation which folded inside a year. Her conclusion is that online space for a scattered nation serves expression well and organising badly, unless the people in it are already connected somewhere on the ground. About half the respondents in one Haitian forum she studied worked with advocacy organisations, and thirty of forty Haitian community groups she catalogued had an email address, a website, or both.

On 5 February 2004 the FLRN seized Gonaives, the town where independence had been proclaimed two hundred years and one month before. Cap-Haitien fell on 22 February. By the end of the month the rebels stood at the edge of Port-au-Prince. Aristide resigned on 29 February and left the country, saying afterward that the American ambassador James Foley had forced the resignation and that he had been carried off against his will. Washington called it a rescue. Supreme Court Justice Boniface Alexandre became interim president and invited American, French and Canadian troops in to hold the capital. In March the United Nations authorised MINUSTAH, a peacekeeping force under Brazilian command that stayed thirteen years. Aristide settled in Pretoria. Whether his removal corrected a democracy or interrupted one has never been agreed, and the argument has the shape of most arguments about Haitian sovereignty, with Haitians on both sides of it and foreign governments holding the aircraft.

In the Dominican presidential election of May 1996 Jose Francisco Pena Gomez took almost 46 percent of the vote. Fifty percent was needed to win outright, so a runoff against Leonel Fernandez was set for June. Balaguer was not a candidate this time and the campaign was less openly dirty than the one two years earlier, though Fernandez's party had already claimed that many registered voters were in fact Haitian nationals. Two weeks before the second round Balaguer announced that his party would unselfishly support Fernandez in order to keep the Dominican nation out of hands that were not truly Dominican. The combined vote of the two parties gave Fernandez 51.25 percent. Direct appeals to whiteness make little sense in a country where most candidates have some black African ancestry and where voters are themselves mostly of mixed descent. What both campaigns worked with instead was the implicit cue, in which a candidate's dark skin was made to stand for foreign origin.

From the 1980s the professional armies that African states inherited from colonial rule faced guerrilla forces armed as well as they were. Cheap automatic weapons, the AK-47 above all, broke a monopoly on firepower that governments had held since the 1890s. Movements that fought with surplus rifles in the 1960s had machine guns and rocket launchers twenty years later. Revolt in southern Sudan became the longest war on the continent. Eritreans fought thirty years for independence under the EPLF, while the TPLF in Ethiopia looked to Albania for a Marxism outside both blocs; their coalition brought down the Ethiopian dictatorship in 1991. Museveni's fighters took Kampala in 1986 and the RPF took power in Rwanda in 1994 as the genocide ran. All of them are still in office. Uganda's no-party system grew intolerant, Kagame used the genocide to close off argument, and Eritrea became one of the most repressive states on the continent. In Somalia, Liberia and Sierra Leone the gunmen had no politics at all.