My book project examines the reconstruction of political order following rebel victories in civil wars. Rebel victors typically seize power in a context of state collapse, in which preexisting armies, police forces and bureaucracies have been debilitated by war. State weakness leaves rebel victors’ nascent regimes existentially vulnerable to a range of postwar armed challenges, including renewed insurgency, military defections, and foreign aggression. Accordingly, many rebel victors follow the route of Somalia (1991) or Liberia (1997–2003) — succumbing to state failure and regime collapse. However, some rebel victors, phoenix-like, manage to raise effective states and durable regimes from the ashes of war. Despite punishing conflicts, rebel victors in Rwanda (1994–present), Eritrea (1993–present) and China (1949–present), established durable, powerful party-state Leviathans. As such, rebel victors number among the ranks of failed states and great powers alike. The puzzle of how rebel victories can produce such markedly varied postwar orders begs for exploration. However, relatively few scholars have taken up the question of why some victorious rebel groups prove to be “state-consolidating” versus “state-subverting” insurgencies – a challenge that “no comparative analysis can ignore” (Clapham 1998: 8).

This project brings both quantitative and qualitative evidence to bear on this puzzle. Below, I give a brief overview of the data collected for this project.

I introduce a new cross-national dataset, the Victorious Insurgent Characteristics that Organize Regimes (VICTOR) dataset, that captures data on the wartime organizational characteristics and postconflict trajectories of all rebel victors and their successor regimes from 1945–2014. The dataset includes extensive qualitative appendices, providing organizational biographies of all rebel victors, with bibliographical materials for each group.

To populate this dataset, I draw on an extensive cross-section of primary and secondary source materials, including rebel biographies, official rebel publications, declassified intelligence memoranda, newspaper articles, conflict histories and archival materials. The images to the right offer a snapshot of the source materials underwriting VICTOR.

I complement the cross-national statistical analyses with qualitative explorations of several cases of rebel victors and their successor regimes in Africa. Africa is a veritable laboratory of rebel rule, proffering massive variation in the durability of rebel regimes. I investigate postwar reconstruction after rebel victory through case studies of rebel regimes in Eritrea, Uganda, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Rwanda. These accounts draw on field interviews with ex-rebel and state elites conducted in Ethiopia (2018) and Uganda (2019).