Why do some civil war victors build strong states with obedient armies, but others do not? Creating a loyal military is one of the fundamental challenges of politics in war-shattered states. Yet even after victory on the battlefield, rebel movements often struggle to turn their insurgent armies — and the field commanders who lead them — into reliable agents of the state. In many cases, ex-rebel commanders retain clandestine armed networks beyond government control, leaving post-conflict states vulnerable to instability and renewed violence.
My book argues that ex-rebel commanders’ choices to cooperate with or resist the postwar regime are strongly shaped by prior processes of warfare and insurgent organization-building. In particular, if rebel field commanders become socially embedded in rebel-occupied communities and develop independent power bases during war, these commanders will be more likely to defy regime demands, leading to spirals of civil-military conflict. Ironically, rebel governance that is welfare-enhancing for civilians may hinder postwar statebuilding. To illustrate this argument, the book draws on an original dataset of commander-community ties in territory controlled by the Forces Nouvelles (FN) rebel group in northern Côte d'Ivoire, along with cross-national evidence from cases of rebel—military integration since 1946.
The Cultural Center in the city of Korhogo, Côte d'Ivoire.
I am indebted to the Fulbright Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the MIT Center for International Studies, the Bridging the Gap Project Summer Fellowship, and MIT GOV/LAB for supporting research for this project.
In 2023 I gave a lecture on the book at the MIT Security Studies Program (SSP) seminar. The talk is available here: