Territorial consolidation after rebel victory: when does civil war recur?

ABSTRACT

Rebel victors of civil war face existential threats both internally and externally. In consolidating territorial control, how do rebel victors respond to domestic armed challengers? Do such decisions determine civil war recurrence? This paper argues that rebel victors can manage domestic risk and consolidate state power by either repressing or coopting challengers. Cooption strategies can range from the less inclusive, such as unilateral changes to the constitution and elite power-sharing arrangements, to the more inclusive, such as signing peace agreements and negotiated constitutional reform. While repression and non-inclusive cooption strategies increase chances of civil recurrence, consensus-based strategies of state consolidation, such as negotiated constitutional reform, reduce repeat civil wars. Evidence is found for our argument in newly configured data on cases of rebel victory since the end of the Cold War (1989–2015).

KEYWORDS:

• rebel victory
• conflict recurrence
• power-sharing
• peace agreement
• constitutional reform

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The authors would like to thank the journal’s two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback. The authors also thank Marie Olson Lounsbery, Karl DeRouen Jr., Brian Urlacher, Jason M. Quinn, participants at the International Studies Association (ISA) conference (2022), and the Peace Accords Matrix (PAM) at the Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.

DATA AVAILABILITY STATEMENT

The data and replication material for this study can be found on the Harvard Dataverse at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/CKHUJF.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Adopting the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) definition, we refer to insurgencies as organised armed domestic challengers to state control, which might have existed during the war as rivals of the winning rebel group or could develop in response to rebel victory, either as a defecting faction of victors or as a mobilised section of dissident population (Gleditsch et al., 2002).

2 Civil war recurrence refers to instances of armed conflict between the rebel government and insurgent groups.

3 We interchangeably use the terms ‘civil conflict’, ‘armed conflict’ and ‘civil war’.

4 Out of 23 cases of rebel victory since the Cold War, only six rebel regimes lost power in the face of either domestic challenges or international interventions. These include rebel regimes in the Comoros (1989–98), Paraguay (1989–2008), Somalia (1991–2000), Haiti (1991–94) and Afghanistan (1992–95, 1996–2001). All six rebel regimes lost power within the first 10 years of incumbency. Thus, in most observations in our dataset, rebel regimes were resilient and insurgencies did not manage to oust the rebel incumbents.

5 We follow O’Leary (2013, p. 3) in defining power-sharing as ‘any set of arrangements that prevents one agent, or organized collective agency, from being the winner who holds all critical power, whether temporarily or permanently’.

6 Since 2015, there have been no cases of rebel victory, except for the Taliban victory in Afghanistan in 2021, which we do not include.

7 See, Table A5 in the supplemental data online.

8 We use a binary measure for democracy, instead of using the continuous Polity scores, because higher levels on the Polity score, indicating institutional democracy, are very rare following rebel victory. We also do not have any theoretical reason to control for the effect of an interval measure of democracy on rebel regimes. Our variable of interest to capture repression is political terror.