Chapter 11 examines how constitutional war powers functioned in the late Cold War and early post–Cold War period. It argues that disputes in the 1980s and 1990s unfolded without domestic mobilization pressures and instead reflected competing views about how the United States should wield force as a Cold War superpower and later as the sole superpower. Under President Reagan, the Executive advanced expansive interpretations of presidential authority in Lebanon and the Persian Gulf to support its rollback strategy, while Congress used process, including War Powers Resolution reporting and funding leverage, to shape and sometimes constrain operations. In Nicaragua, Congress went further by blocking covert action through the Boland Amendments, prompting administration allies to press a significant theory of inherent presidential power to wage covert warfare. After the Cold War, presidents carried these practices into a unipolar era. In the 1991 Gulf War and humanitarian interventions of the 1990s, presidents alternated between asserting broad authority and acknowledging limits, while UN mandates carried diplomatic but little constitutional weight. Taken together, the chapter depicts war powers evolving through sustained interbranch bargaining rather than decisive constitutional settlement.

Chapter 8 examines political systems with the highest values of T, or time since the last successful coup. It explains how and why dictatorships as different as the PRIs in Mexico (1929–2000) and the Somoza family’s in Nicaragua (1936–79) effected an autocratic exit out of the coup trap. And it analyzes how the republics of Colombia, Chile, Costa Rica, and Uruguay escaped from golpismo by constructing constitutional democracy. Successful transitions away from the Coup Trap, I find, occur if they survive what I call “trial by fire” – assaults on their authority – that allow them to purge the armed forces of sedition. Escapes from the Coup Trap are also a function of convincing the political opposition to desist from joining coup coalitions, which dictatorships and democracies accomplish in slightly different ways.

Although basic freedoms (such as freedom of thought) in Nicaragua were decreed in 1869, their implementation did not have major repercussions until 1893 with the approval of La Liberrima – an important transformation in the country. Its introduction reflected a great change in the relationship of religion and the Constitutions of 1838 and 1858. An analysis of La Liberrima is necessary to study the original development of Protestantism as a social phenomenon within modern Nicaragua. Following the irruption of radical liberalism at the end of the nineteenth century, Protestantism expanded and developed new forms of association. In this context, the emergence and meaning of the phenomenon can be linked to modernizing forms of civil participation that created local bases and fomented its expansion including churches, schools, health-related projects, and publications. The chapter also includes an examination of a Protestant publication, principally the magazine Antorcha, to highlight the evolution of Protestantism as a historical process. Based on these documents, this work aims to broadly assess the emergence of local Protestant actions that developed in a less than welcoming environment.

Chapter 12 offers a provocative and jurisprudentially ambitious argument: that sovereign equality requires states to submit to international adjudication or arbitration even in ordinary legal disputes that do not involve overlapping sovereign rights or powers.

This chapter examines the tenure of British Consul William Dougal Christie who sought to settle territorial disputes over the Mosquito Shore with rival Central American republics and attempted to establish unchallenged British authority over the Nicaragua Canal route by shifting the capital of the Mosquito Kingdom to the harbor of San Juan del Norte (renamed Greytown). Nicaraguan officials challenged the British position by arguing that the Mosquito Kingdom was a fiction erected by the British. As the possibility of a Nicaraguan Canal loomed ahead, competing sovereign powers of Britain and Nicaragua converged on the authenticity of the Afro-Indigenous Mosquito Kingdom as the linchpin around which to settle their territorial dispute over the San Juan delta.

Chapter 6 offers an analysis of the Nicaraguan Revolution with a particular focus on Araceli Pérez Darias, a Mexican citizen of Spanish descent fighting with the Sandinistas on the Western Front in Nicaragua during the late 1970s. She was ambushed, raped and killed in 1979. Using Araceli’s life story as a prism, this chapter offers a unique survey of women’s contribution to transnational warfare in the twentieth century, arguing that their challenges were multiple. Unlike their male comrades in arms, they were generally not allowed to fight at the front. Further, they were often subjected to abuses, and their armed resistance – originally motivated by their opposition to the enemy – eventually became intertwined with their struggle to be accepted as equals by the movement they represented at the front. In addition, the chapter provides the first comprehensive overview of the foreign brigades fighting for the Sandinistas, explaining why some have survived in the collective memory of the revolution while the most decisive of them all, consisting of Panamanian volunteers, were cast into oblivion.

The epilogue explains West German engagement with Latin American politics from 1988 to 1992, restates the historiographical contributions of the book, and briefly examines the trajectory of market-friendly and market-critical human rights from the 1990s into the 2000s. Christian Democratic officials encouraged market-friendly democratization in Latin America by supporting the electoral ouster of the Sandinistas in 1990, and providing development aid packages to El Salvador despite continued abuses and rampant corruption. Alongside the collapse of state socialism in East Central Europe, democratization in Latin America helped enthrone market-friendly human rights into German reason of state. But the market-friendly conditionality principle instituted in 1991 has selectively targeted some states, such as Cuba, while ignoring abuses in countries important to German economic development. Market-critical human rights activism endured by establishing links with left-wing parties in Germany and with the transnational anti-globalization movement. But the propensity of some of its adherents to support authoritarian states makes it an easy target for market-friendly advocates. However, market-critical human rights can be a helpful corrective to an international human rights system that has largely eschewed criticism of inequality since the 1990s.

Aiming to move beyond the limited primary sources on which polarised debate is usually based, this chapter reviews new data on UN Security Council practice in response to consensual interventions. From 1990 to 2013, the Council passed resolutions on 76 per cent of all internal conflicts. This chapter evaluates that response in light of four leading theories: of the Court in Nicaragua, that governmental invitations are always valid; of the Institut de droit international (IDI), that pro-government interventions are ‘allowable’ until a conflict becomes a civil war; that intervention is allowable at the invitation of an elected ‘democratic’ government to secure or restore its power; and that it is allowable in response to an invitation to counter ‘terrorist’ threats. The data shows that the Council does not unequivocally support the Nicaragua or IDI views but has approved regularly the anti-terrorist, and occasionally the pro-democracy, views. Its active voice is more marked than its alignment with any one theory. Among other implications, the IDI view – a Cold War response to abuses of supposed invitations – may be less salient when a multilateral check on such abuses is available.

The concluding chapter extends the book’s theoretical insights in three ways. First, it explores the extent to which the causal process elaborated here might travel beyond irregular civil war settings and reflect processes of institutional change in other threat-laden environments. Second, it revisits the theory’s scope conditions and discusses when we might observe the wartime emergence of state-bolstering or “reinforcing” rules, as well as whether different institutional logics can emerge in distinct policy arenas within the same state. Finally, it elaborates the broader theoretical, conceptual, and policy implications of this research. It focuses particular attention on what this framework means for state development amid armed conflict, the relationship between the state and organized crime in war, the theory and practice of post-conflict reconstruction, and understandings of “the state” more broadly.

Chapter 3 provides a concise history of Guatemala’s and Nicaragua’s highly divergent conflict dynamics, but also illustrates how similarly narrow and insulated counterinsurgent coalitions emerged. The chapter first describes the road to armed conflict in both countries. It then examines the variables central to the process of wartime institutional change: the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat and the creation of a narrow counterinsurgent elite coalition with heightened decision-making discretion. It chronicles two moments in the Guatemalan armed conflict (the late-1960s and mid-1970s) and one moment in Nicaragua’s Contra War (early to mid-1980s) in which state leaders perceived a marked increase in the threat posed by insurgent forces. Finally, it examines how this sense of state vulnerability reconfigured wartime structures of political power in both cases as state leaders sought to combat the mounting insurgent threat.

Chapter 7 lays the foundations for the second half of the book, which focuses on the question of institutional persistence within and beyond conflict. It chronicles the road to political transition and peace in both Guatemala and Nicaragua. The chapter then examines a key difference between the two settings: the coalitional configurations that emerged from war. It provides an in-depth examination of how these dynamics played out within the three institution-level cases examined in the previous chapters. Specifically, it illustrates how the Moreno Network and Detective Corps in Guatemala laid the foundations of institutional survival by broadening the distributional coalition—the web of interest groups with a stake in the fraudulent customs arrangements and extrajudicial killing, respectively. Meanwhile, the FSLN’s transformation into the political opposition in Nicaragua following its 1990 electoral defeat resulted in persistent coalitional volatility, which bred chronic instability within postwar institutions.

Chapter 10 returns to the Nicaraguan context, examining the country’s experience of postwar chronic instability within land tenure. It traces how frequent elite political realignments drove the breakdown of the undermining rules governing land titling. After losing the 1990 elections, the FSLN retained considerable influence and pressured the new UNO government into compromise; however, within the property sector, a new decision-making coalition came to dominate – one comprised of UNO technocrats, US government agencies, and international civil society groups dedicated to resolving the confusion and conflict sown by previous policies. As a result, new procedures to formalize land acquisitions emerged. However, this neoliberal coalition was again unsettled with the return of the FSLN to the political scene through a series of bargains with the ruling Liberal Party in the 2000s. The eventual second period of FSLN rule beginning in 2007 has further reconcentrated land and resulted in politically motivated confiscations.

Chapter 6 turns to the case of Nicaragua’s land tenure institutions, analyzing the emergence of new land titling rules that stoked insecurity and corruption. It argues that the Contra War (1980–1990) remade the rules of agrarian reform and land titling in ways that subverted the state’s ability to regulate property ownership and opened up a property rights gap. As the perceived threat posed by the insurgency deepened and large numbers of peasant producers defected to the rebels’ side, the increasingly narrow and highly centralized FSLN coalition in power implemented a series of alternative rules that permitted the individual and provisional titling of unregistered lands, which generated greater peasant dependence on the incumbent regime but also heightened corruption and conflict.