With rebels toppling governments in Afghanistan in 2021 and Syria in 2024, there has been greater interest in rebel victories. Rebel victories were especially common throughout Africa in the second half of the twentieth century, with rebel victors remaining in power today in countries ranging from Côte d’Ivoire to Congo and Eritrea to Mozambique. Not all rebel victors, however, consolidate power, failing to secure popular support and the national territory.
Shelley X. Liu’s Governing after War focuses on African victors’ rebellion era and post-victory efforts to establish and manage relations with civilian populations. Work on civil wars and their aftermaths often centers national-level variables related to regime type and durability (e.g., Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way’s Revolution and Dictatorship, 2024) or peace and conflict recurrence (e.g., Monica Duffy Toft’s Securing the Peace, 2009). Other recent books on rebel victories focus more on the security sector (Philip Martin’s Strong Commanders, Weak States, 2025) and national-level statebuilding efforts (Kai M. Thaler’s When Rebels Win, 2025). Liu turns our attention to subnational, population-centric variables and how the relationships with civilians that rebel groups establish while fighting the state shape how they govern regions and populations after winning. Liu’s book offers both a broader view of politics and a more granular view of how rebellion-era ties shape rebel victors’ rule.
Building on work on rebel governance, post-conflict politics, and statebuilding, Liu argues that rebels have incentives to govern in areas where they are operating, since civilians can provide intelligence, labor, and resources, but also because stable relations can help secure a region, letting rebels efficiently extract resources and turn their military attention elsewhere. Rebels establish the strongest civilian ties where they have more lasting presence and build governing institutions and relationships, while they can also gain support from populations elsewhere with shared identities.
A key contribution is showing how wartime ties produce surprising patterns of post-victory resource distribution and governance. Civilian supporters and scholars might expect rebel victors to reward the populations that supported their war efforts, directing resources their way. Liu instead argues that rebel victors tend to take those supporters for granted. Development efforts in victors’ wartime strongholds are more likely to employ popular mobilization efforts, seeking to translate loyalty into more-or-less voluntary labor. In contested areas where no actor secured hegemony, rebel victors see opportunities to co-opt populations and so invest resources and deploy bureaucratic infrastructure to manage the population. Areas and communities where the old regime or rebel rivals had strong support are likely to be seen as threatening and requiring a coercive approach to establish the rebel victors’ authority.
Resources are scarce after civil war, though, so rebel victors face what Liu describes as a security-development tradeoff (pp. 66–67). Threats from old regime remnants and rebel rivals make rebel victors invest more in security forces at the expense of development efforts that could help co-opt more civilians’ loyalty or quiescence and prevent new rebellions’ expansion. If rebel victors cannot quickly secure control over wartime rivals’ strongholds, they may face a long “consolidation conflict” (pp. 68–70) or even lose power.
To test the argument, Liu relies on both in-depth subnational analyses and cross-national comparisons. She primarily focuses on the Zimbabwe African National Union (ZANU) and the National Patriotic Front of Liberia (NPFL). Liu combines evidence from original interviews and focus groups in Liberia and archival material, previously recorded interviews, and several original elite interviews in Zimbabwe with administrative and secondary data sources. Four secondary case studies comparing rebel victors in Angola and Côte d’Ivoire and in Burundi and Rwanda (chapter 7) probe how the theory generalizes.
The Zimbabwe (chapter 4) and Liberia (chapters 5 and 6) case studies triangulate across data sources to examine territorial and social control during the initial civil wars and how they impacted governance and statebuilding efforts after rebel victory. Quantitative evidence in these post-conflict situations is often limited, biased, and incomplete, and Liu has done difficult, valuable work to map rebel influence during wartime, while the qualitative evidence provides good insights into ZANU and the NPFL’s approaches to civilians in different zones of control or loyalty. Quantitative analyses then test wartime ties’ influence on post-victory outcomes related to development and armed conflict.
There are places where more evidence could have been helpful. The argument emphasizes “deployed bureaucrats” (pp. 59–60) as important to win support and distribute resources in unsecured areas, but these actors’ voices are limited among the interviewees and focus group participants. Educational attainment data from post-war censuses on years of schooling (and literacy rates for Liberia) provide the main quantitative measure for development efforts, showing differences across rebel strongholds, unsecured areas, and rival strongholds, yet data on budget allocations, school construction, or teacher presence might have made the proposed reasons behind the relationship more convincing. This is not, however, a major concern: fieldwork and data on and in conflict-affected settings are such that what might be ideal empirically is never attainable in practice. By combining different data sources and analyses, Liu increases confidence in her argument and conclusions.
In the Liberia case study, a lingering question is how much Charles Taylor, the NPFL’s domineering leader, ever cared about public-facing development efforts. The measures that won Taylor popularity—keeping inflation down and the price of rice low (p. 169)—were broad economic policies, versus the targeted development efforts the theory emphasizes in contested areas. Liu argues that there was never sufficient security for the NPFL to invest resources in development and co-optation, and provides suggestive evidence that aid organizations’ programs were directed toward contested areas or strongholds (pp. 174–177). Given Taylor’s self-enrichment and aggrandizement pre- and post-victory, however, it is easy to envision him continuing to ignore development spending even if the regime was more secure.
In Angola, the post-victory development of “a patrimonial oil state that resembled Liberia under Charles Taylor” (p. 219) likewise may have resulted from the more personalistic and materialistic José Eduardo dos Santos ascending to post-victory leadership in the Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola (MPLA), as much as the security situation. Individual leaders do not always determine the direction of rebel groups or governments, but where one leader personalizes power, the impact of their preferences deserves greater scrutiny.
The MPLA case study also focuses primarily on competition with the rival rebel União Nacional para a Independência Total de Angola (UNITA), leaving aside the crucial international dimension of the post-victory conflict. South Africa militarily intervened against the MPLA and gave UNITA space to operate, while Cuban intervention helped the MPLA secure the capital and survive. Future work might therefore connect Liu’s careful subnational theorizing to international relations scholarship on rebel diplomacy, foreign security partnerships and intervention, and statebuilding.
Another issue for further research is civilian attitudes about stability versus democracy after rebel victory. As Liu discusses in the conclusion (p. 261), rebel victors with strong civilian ties might initially encourage public participation when consolidating power, but tend to rule more coercively over time. How long do rebellion-era ties or early post-victory co-optation efforts provide a legitimacy dividend, and when do they erode, incentivizing more coercion to maintain power? This may vary subnationally and across cases, as well as respond to new domestic or international shocks.
Book-writing involves trade-offs, so Liu could not be expected to analyze every topic or analyze every potential data source. The theory and insights raise important questions for readers interested in multiple aspects of civil wars, statebuilding, and political development, while the methodological approach is a great exemplar of how to combine quantitative rigor and rich qualitative data in studying conflict-affected settings. These strengths make Governing after War a major contribution across political science and public policy.
