Across Africa, there are at least 13 countries where former armed rebellions are currently in power, having quashed their former rivals – Ethiopia, Rwanda, Uganda, Chad, Angola, Namibia, and Mozambique are some of these. These governments are all strikingly durable; each of them has stayed in power for over thirty years. And yet, for each of these cases, there are those who have seized power only partially, facing continued large rebellions (South Sudan, Libya), or have been pushed out altogether (Charles Taylor in Liberia, Hissene Habré in Chad, or Michel Djotodia in the Central African Republic).
Why do some rebel movements succeed in consolidating power while others falter? This is the central puzzle Shelley Liu addresses in Governing After War. She surveys, but ultimately finds inadequate, the prevailing explanations – that rebel durability depends on popularity, wartime governance capacity, military strength, or alliance-building. Instead, she argues that outcomes hinge on a combination of rebels’ wartime relations with civilians and their resource allocation strategies after victory.
The sequence she describes is straightforward: Rebels who forged strong ties with civilians during the war can rely on this base without investing heavily in it after taking power. Freed from this burden, they can direct resources toward the rest of the country. These areas fall into two categories: unsecured terrain, where rebels lack strong ties but face little organised resistance, and rival terrain, where hostile armed groups remain entrenched. In the former, rulers can consolidate through development projects and bureaucratic investment; in the latter, they must often resort to military force.
In the end, Liu argues, the rebels who are most successful are those who both had a strong wartime social base, and were able to deftly balance development and military spending after coming to power. If they do not have a large enough social base or if they miscalibrate their priorities during the post-conflict period, they will overextend themselves, leading to their demise.
The empirical chapters on Liberia and Zimbabwe are the book’s most impressive contribution. Liu blends quantitative and qualitative methods, drawing on archival research, focus groups with former combatants, and carefully coded data to produce a nuanced assessment of rebel rule and postwar governance.
She demonstrates convincingly that wartime civilian relations shape postwar trajectories. For instance, the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) invested heavily in education in areas contested during the war, while employing violent repression in former Zimbabwe African People’s Union (ZAPU) strongholds. By contrast, Charles Taylor’s National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL), which had cultivated few civilian ties, relied on heavy-handed coercion in its bid to consolidate power – an approach that ultimately led to overreach and collapse.
Yet Liu is less persuasive in showing that these dynamics fully determine outcomes. Her discussion of Rwanda illustrates the limits of her framework. The Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF) did indeed adopt a coercive governing style in response to weak wartime civilian ties, reinforcing her argument. But in this case, militarism underpinned consolidation rather than undermining it, thanks to the RPF’s organisational strength. Similarly, in Côte d’Ivoire, Alassane Ouattara’s government consolidated power not only through civil–rebel dynamics but also through external backing, a robust private sector, and the weakness of its opposition. At times Liu acknowledges such complexity; elsewhere she tends to privilege one factor above all others.
Governing After War is a valuable addition to the literature on rebel governance. It bridges the divide between conflict and post-conflict studies by showing how both form part of a continuous process of state-building. Liu concludes by urging policymakers to confront the trade-offs between democratisation and stability in postwar contexts, underscoring that seemingly neutral projects of state-building are always political and deeply context-dependent.
