Description
How does war make states? This paper explains variation in post-conflict state formation. It develops an analytical framework integrating theories of state formation and research on rebel governance and civil war to answer its research question: how does the legacy of violent conflict and armed movements impact post-war state-making?
States are crucial for domestic and international stability, yet their emergence is still poorly understood particularly beyond Europe. IR scholarship has primarily debated the potential of international state-building to stabilize states in (post-)conflict settings. What this debate has however neglected is that statehood usually does not emerge from international intervention but from domestic processes. To fill this gap, this paper examines post-conflict state formation from an inside-out perspective by starting the analysis from victorious armed movements engaged in civil wars. Both in Somaliland and Eritrea rebels have achieved major victories defeating the previous powerholders and establishing new states. Despite these similarities, state formation developed along polarly opposed pathways corresponding each to one of the main camps in state formation research. Eritrea approximates an ideal-typical bellicist pathway of state formation: the former rebels became the state and imposed it coercively on Eritrean territory. Today the military administration still prevails over civilian structures. Somaliland, in turn, represents a cooperative pathway of state formation. After the rebel’s victory, traditional authorities and the emerging political elites took the lead and state-building occurred through a series of major clan conferences. I argue that the legacies of rebellion account for these opposed pathways of state formation. The dynamics of the preceding civil wars and the rebel’s organizational characteristics, particularly their economic mode of reproduction and ideological orientation, have had a lasting impact on post-conflict state formation and shape the reality of statehood to this day.
