Rebel Victory, State Power, and the Durability of Rebel Regimes

Abstract

After victorious rebel groups seize power, they face formidable postwar challenges. Rebel victors inherit states shattered by war, and often confront new postwar armed opponents seeking to exploit state weakness and seize power. Despite these common challenges, the consequences of rebel victory vary widely – some victors succumb to state weakness, renewed conflict and regime breakdown, yet others successfully establish powerful postwar states and durable regimes. Rebel victory is thus a sharp fork in the road, producing radically dissimilar postwar orders. I advance a novel theory to explain this variation. I argue that postwar regime durability and state strength are rooted in rebel victors’ wartime governance institutions. Rebels create wartime institutions to regulate the behavior of their combatants, as well as govern civilian populations in their areas of operation. However, wartime institutions are costly to build. Some rebels forgo these costs to focus primarily on unleashing violence, while others shoulder these costs and create extensive wartime institutions. I demonstrate that rebel victors that built a wider range of wartime institutions enter the postwar era with greater military cohesion, civilian support and administrative skills. These wartime advantages help highly institutionalized victors construct stronger postwar states more capable of weathering challenges to regime survival. Wartime investment in governance creates postwar dividends in the form of regime and state strength. I find support for this theory using a mixed methods research design. Constructing an original global dataset capturing information on the wartime institutions of all rebel victors from 1945—2014, I demonstrate empirically that victors with a denser portfolio of wartime institutions establish substantially more durable regimes. Leveraging field interviews, primary and secondary sources, I further illustrate the logic through case studies of three African rebel victors.