Description
How do different types of armed forces emerge after rebel victory in civil war? Once they capture the state, those who have been successfully “living by the gun” take control over military institutions. Yet, armed forces appear to be playing different parts in postwar societies. The civil war scholarship recently addressed the problem of postwar civil-military relations from the perspective of regime stability and war recurrence. However, the focus on the military as a source of (dis)order has obscured other aspects of civil-military relations that can have pervasive effects on recovering societies. Building on the scholarship on civil war, state formation, and civil-military relations, I argue that counterinsurgency operations exerted on rebels and rebel long-term goals are two critical factors that shape together the type of armed forces that emerge after rebel victory. Based on fieldwork in Kosovo and Ethiopia, I test causal pathways that account for the trajectories of the Kosovo Liberation Army to the Kosovo Security Forces and of the Tigray People’s Liberation Front to the Ethiopian National Defense Force.