Governing After War

Reviews / Votes

Governing after War is a quantum leap forward in scholarship on post-war politics. Liu does a marvelous job analyzing the political tradeoffs and intense threats that post-war states face, and she develops a counterintuitive theory about how rebel victors balance security and development priorities based on wartime ties with civilians. The multi-method data collection in the two main cases of Zimbabwe and Liberia is creative and rigorous, and the empirics are further supported by an original analysis of four other African countries. Anyone interested in post-war peace building, civil war dynamics, rebel governance, and African politics should read this book. * Scott Straus, University of California-Berkeley * How do rebel victors of civil wars allocate development and coercive resources after winning control of the state? This penetrating analysis of Zimbabwe and Liberia provides an important answer: ties to civilians during wartime guide rebels' ability to consolidate power and prevent violence recurrence in war's aftermath. Providing the critical link between rebel governance and state building, the book is a must read for scholars of postwar politics. * Sarah Zukerman Daly, Columbia University * Fundamental to politics is the state, its capacity, and how political actors consolidate control over its institutions. In Governing After War, Shelley Liu compellingly explains sub-national variation in how rebel victors exert and expand state control once conflict is over. Liu argues that rebel victors leverage institutions and civilian connections forged during war to direct resources to key constituencies in ways that reduce the likelihood of conflict recurrence. Artfully weaving quantitative and qualitative evidence, Liu's pioneering work bridges war-time governance with post-war state-building, making it a must-read for scholars in both fields. * Megan Stewart, Ford School of Public Policy, University of Michigan * A tremendous advance in the study of post-war politics, Liu offers an insightful and compelling analysis of how rebel victories produce distinct political behaviors. Eschewing the tendency to view statebuilding as unfolding upon a blank canvas, Liu instead shows how behaviors forged amidst the fighting can shape the behavior of the new regime. Combining sophisticated and often surprising logics with extensive ethnographic and other evidence, Liu's contribution is sure to make a mark in the wider fields of conflict resolution and statebuilding. * Zachariah Mampilly, Marxe School of Public and International Affairs, City University of New York * Shelley Liu's Governing After War offers a major advancement in addressing the likely post-war trajectories of states after rebel victory. Liu argues that the nature of rebel-civilian ties during the preceding civil war shapes the victor's ability to consolidate their rule and avoid, or at least survive, civil war recurrence. * Journal of Peace Research * The book offers a nuanced version of a rational choice argument that offers falsifiable hypotheses. Scholars studying postwar politics and state-building, and a general audience interested in how to achieve durable peace in conflict-torn settings, will find it worth reading. * Carrie Manning, International Affairs *