Rebel victories are among the most dramatic events in political life. The defeat and replacement of the Assad regime in Syria by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham in 2024, the fall of Saigon in 1975, the fall of Kabul in 2021, and the triumph of the Rwandan Patriotic Front in 1994 Rwanda all fundamentally reshaped the basic contours of politics in each country, and each had broader ripple effects beyond their borders.
Kai Thaler’s When Rebels Win explores a crucial aspect of life after rebel victory: the ways in which victorious new regimes seek to build (or not build) state structures. Much existing work on rebel governance has focused on their period of ongoing war-fighting (i.e., Ana Arjona, Rebelocracy, 2016); only newer work has begun systematically grappling with these aftermaths of victory (for instance, Shelley Liu, Governing After War, 2024).
Thaler’s book brings together two variables to generate a new framework of rebel organizational types, each of which is associated with a different pattern of governance. The first dimension of variation distinguishes between opportunistic and programmatic insurgent groups, with the latter pursuing farther-reaching and more ambitious post-war state building, and the latter being consumed by short-term and material goals.
This variable helps us make sense of the extent of a victorious group’s goals; the next variable—of inclusive versus exclusive benefits—helps us understand for whom this governance is undertaken. More inclusive movements seek to bring the state and its services to broad sections of society, even those that were not directly supportive of the insurgent movement. Exclusive movements, on the other hand, seek to govern in the name of particular and narrow constituencies.
Thaler’s approach can be seen as merging two previous strands of the literature: one on the nature of insurgent movement motivation (such as Jeremy Weinstein, Inside Rebellion, 2006) and the other on the political visions of insurgents (i.e., Megan Stewart, Governing for Revolution, 2021; Zachariah Mampilly, Rebel Rulers, 2011). Thaler blends these together to arrive at a novel mapping of victorious rebels: programmatic-inclusive, opportunistic-exclusive, programmatic-exclusive, and opportunistic-inclusive. He also notes that there can be “middle-ground” (p. 29) groups that do not neatly fall into a specific category.
Opportunistic-exclusive and programmatic-inclusive groups occupy Thaler’s primary focus. The former should focus mainly on maintaining their coercive power while directing benefits to themselves and their core constituents. By contrast, programmatic-inclusive groups will build on infrastructural power, such as roads, education, and public health, across the state’s territory.
Thaler’s core hypotheses are quite clear and offer unambiguous predictions: programmatic-inclusive groups should devote resources “toward expanding state influence, implementing new programs, and delivering public goods and services” (p. 37), while opportunistic-exclusive groups will “engage in minimal statebuilding once in power” (p. 38). Thaler does a particularly nice job specifying how he will measure organizational type ex ante, as well as identifying the limits of alternative explanations.
His research design builds on a set of comparative case studies, leveraging both cross-case and over-time variation. Thaler uses fieldwork in Liberia, El Salvador, Uganda, and the United States, along with secondary and primary sources, to inform the case work.
For Thaler, the Frente Sandinista de Liberación Nacional (FSLN) in El Salvador is the most inclusive and programmatic of the core cases, pursuing a fairly ambitious state-building agenda after it came to power (chapter 2). This is Thaler’s classic case of deeply ideological leftist insurgency that expanded the state into new geographic terrain and substantive domains. The opportunistic-exclusive case is the National Patriotic Front of Liberia, which is well known for its remarkable lack of basic interest or skill in governance or institution-building (chapter 3). The group largely embraced self-gain and repression under Charles Taylor’s rule, paying mere lip service to development or state capacity. This is followed by the National Resistance Movement (NRM) in Uganda, which is closer to a mixed case in the center of the property space as a middle-ground case (chapter 4). It showed, as expected, an intermediate level of interest in governing and institutionalizing its rule.
The case work on these three groups is compelling, showing clear linkages between the groups’ structures and ideological projects and their state-building priorities after victory. Thaler then explores several groups in Angola (both during and after colonialism) to show that groups can vary dramatically even within the same war when fighting the same enemy. He also examines several cases of victorious Islamist rebels in Algeria, Iran, and Afghanistan to see if the same basic logics hold as with other kinds of groups. These are valuable extensions to broaden the reach of the project.
This is an important and valuable book that clearly advances our understanding of a deeply important phenomenon. I strongly recommend it to readers for its mix of theoretical range and empirical depth, as well as its focus on state-building as a crucial outcome of interest.
However, there are two related areas that present themselves for deeper future research. First, the greater interest of programmatic-inclusive groups in state-building and ambitious political goals compared to opportunists seems to be firmly in line with much of the existing literature. I wished there were more on the programmatic-exclusive category, which receives several intriguing but too brief pages of discussion (pp. 39–42) and strikes me as a fascinating and important area of study.
One reason I would have liked to see more on these groups is the second area for further work: this concerns the question of what exactly “inclusiveness” means. For Thaler, groups claiming to represent and expand the polity to be given access to public goods are inclusive: they “provide public goods … without significant favoritism or discrimination … bringing more of the population under the state’s political influence when in power” (p. 29).
Yet, many nominally inclusive projects are nevertheless characterized by boundaries and hierarchies that make inclusion much more complicated. While Thaler closely associates programmatic groups with inclusiveness, deeply committed ideologues often identify enemies within, wreckers and saboteurs, suspect ethnic minorities, anti-national elements, class enemies, and so forth to be destroyed or repressed, while de facto providing much greater benefits for ruling elites and their supporters than for the general public. There is a risk of romanticism about the actual, existing political projects of victorious rebels that need to be guarded against. The same can be true of populist political movements, which sometimes argue that they represent the true people against deracinated elites or subversive outsiders. Future work could delve into more fine-grained configurations of inclusion and exclusion rather than arraying them on a more/less dichotomy.
These are deep, challenging issues that no single book will be able to surmount. One of the many virtues of When Rebels Win is that it gets us thinking more carefully and broadly about how to consider the relationships between ideology, mobilization, and the state in a world in which many previously fixed notions about their interactions have been called into question.
