RebeLeg: Legacies of violence, rebels and post-conflict state formation

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How does war make states? RebeLeg explains variation in post-conflict state formation. It develops an original analytical framework integrating theories of state formation and research on rebel governance and civil war to systematically answer its core 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 remains poorly understood particularly beyond Europe. A vast literature has addressed the external dimension of state-making and debated the potential of international state-building to stabilize weak or failing states in (post-)conflict settings. What this debate has however neglected is that statehood usually does not emerge from, or in the context of, international intervention but instead from domestically-led processes. To fill this gap, RebeLeg examines processes of post-conflict state formation from an inside-out perspective by starting the analysis from victorious armed movements engaged in civil wars. Drawing on its novel analytical framework, RebeLeg studies two African regions - the Horn of Africa and Southern Africa - and explains the varying trajectories of post-conflict state formation in Eritrea, Somaliland, Namibia and Zimbabwe through systematic comparisons. Its case studies combine process tracing and the comparative method and rely both onsecondary resources and primary data from field research. RebeLeg's results will contribute to a significantly better understanding of post-conflict state formation. These highly relevant findings will facilitate international support for post-conflict states and can inform a new approach moving away from failing militarised interventions as in Afghanistan or Iraq.