Security Consolidation in the Aftermath of Civil War: Explaining the Fates of Victorious Militias

• Author: Bumba Mukherjee,Brandon Bolte,Minnie M. Joo
• Published date: 01 October 2021
• Date: 01 October 2021
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0022002721995528
• Subject Matter: Articles

Article

Security Consolidation in

the Aftermath of Civil

War: Explaining the Fates

of Victorious Militias

Brandon Bolte

1

, Minnie M. Joo

2

,

and Bumba Mukherjee

1

Abstract

Policymakers and peacebuilding research often focus on rebel groups when studying

demobilization and integration processes, but post-war governments must also

manage the non-state militias that helped them gain or maintain power. Why do

some post-war governments disintegrate their militia allies, while others integrate

them into the military? We argue that when a salient ethnic difference exists

between the (new) ruling elite and an allied militia, a process of mutual uncertainty

in the post-war period will incentivize governments to disintegrate the group.

However, governments will be most likely to integrate their militias when the

military has sufficient coercive capabilities but few organizational hindrances to

re-organizing. Using new data on the post-war fates of victorious militias across all

civil conflicts from 1989 to 2014, we find robust support for these claims. The results

suggest that a government’s optimal militia management strategy is shaped by both

social and organizational constraints during the post-war period.

Keywords

militias, civil wars, domestic security, military integration, DDR

1

Department of Political Science, Penn State University, University Park, PA, USA

2

Department of Political Science, University of Massachusetts Lowell, Lowell, MA, USA

Corresponding Author:

Brandon Bolte, Department of Political Science, Penn State University, 203 Pond Laboratory, University

Park, PA 16802, USA.

Email: blb72@psu.edu

Journal of Conflict Resolution

2021, Vol. 65(9) 1459-1488

ªThe Author(s) 2021

Article reuse guidelines:

sagepub.com/journals-permissions

DOI: 10.1177/0022002721995528

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Introduction

The use of auxiliary non-state militias by governments is a controversial attribute of

most contemporary civil wars. Such groups are often harbingers of social instability

and frequently indulge in gratuitous violence, perpetrating some of the most egre-

gious violations of human rights in contemporary history. Militias like the notorious

Interahamwe in Rwanda and Janjaweed in Sudan are pervasive across time and

space, yet scholars have recently remarked that “we have little systematic under-

standing of when and why the link between the militia and the state breaks off and

what then happens to these groups ...The death ...or political ‘afterlife’ of militias

is unexplored territory” (Carey and Mitchell 2017, 135). In the Democratic Republic

of the Congo, for instance, the copious militia groups have met wildly different fates

after aiding the government in combating rebel organizations: the government has

integrated large portions of t he Coalition of Congolese Patr iotic Resistance but

allowed many other Mai Mai village militias to remain active even in

post-conflict periods. Elsewhere, governments intentionally form or enlist militias

that are ethnically or religiously different from the ruling elites and then quickly

dissemble them after the conflict. Examples of this pattern abound, from the Civil

Defense Patrols of Guatemala, to the Comit ´

e de Vigilance de Tassara in Niger, to

the various Tamil militias in Sri Lanka.

Despite the wealth of literature on militarily integrating (Glassmyer and Samba-

nis 2008; Krebs and Licklider 2015) or otherwise sharing power with opposition

forces after a civil war (Hartzell and Hoddie 2003; Matanock 2016), current research

often ignores the fact that rebels are not the only non-state armed actors that

governments must deal with once violence has subsided (Staniland 2015). We take

an important step toward filling this gap by investigating the fates of victorious

militias in the aftermath of civil war. We define a victorious militia as an armed,

non-state organization that fought as part of the victorious side in the war and/or

explicitly coordinated with or was subservient to the ruling elite in charge of the

executive after the conflict has ended.

Since governments tend to remain in power after civil wars more often than rebels

seize power, many of these groups are pro-government militias (PGMs) with some

form of linkage with the incumbent ruling elite. However, when rebel leaders take

control of government or successfully secede, they too must manage their main

non-state organization as well as any auxiliary forces that helped bring them to

power. Regardless of whether the incumbents retain power or rebels take it, in the

absence of the conflict in which militia forces were meant to fight, the new ruling

elite must decide whether to dissolve or integrate these non-state forces that fought

on their behalf or allow them to continue operating as unofficial pro-state militias.

We generated Figure 1 using our global sample (described below) of victorious

non-state militia groups. Figure 1 illustrates two important points. First, victorious

militias that were active in a civil war frequently survive beyond the cessation of

violence. Second, our data exhibit remarkable variation in how these groups

1460 Journal of Conflict Resolution 65(9)