Introduction
Although relatively uncommon,Footnote 1 rebel victories in civil war are important political events with profound domestic and international repercussions. Afghanistan, for example, has experienced regime change through rebel victory on four occasions since the moribund government of Muhammed Najibullah was defeated by a fractious coalition of mujahideen groups in 1992. The victorious mujahideen, who had fought their way to power with enormous financial and military support from the United States and Pakistan,Footnote 2 immediately turned their guns on each other, laying further waste to a country already devastated by years of war.Footnote 3 The anarchy of the mid-1990s witnessed the emergence of the extremist Taliban, who capitalised on the unpopularity of the mujahideen warlords,Footnote 4 driving them from the capital Kabul in 1996.Footnote 5 Remarkably, the Taliban succeeded in forcing the remnants of the mujahideen to a small northern enclave of the territory, and ‘imposed a nearly unified political order for the first time since 1979’.Footnote 6 Just five years later, however, they were defeated by their ex-mujahideen enemies, who had regrouped as the ‘Northern Alliance’ and were the beneficiaries of sudden and direct intervention by the United States military and other foreign forces. Under international supervision and occupation, the political structure of the Afghan state was reconfigured entirely, and efforts were made to develop democratic institutions while the ousted Taliban waged an increasingly violent and effective rural insurgency.Footnote 7 In the late summer of 2021, following the departure of international forces from the country, the Taliban swept to power for a second time, after defeating the domestic Afghan army with remarkable ease.
The recent history of Afghanistan is illustrative of two important points about rebel victory. The first is that, in civil war, victory is by no means a conclusive outcome. Contrary to Patterson’sFootnote 8 view that victory ‘stops dead the cycle of reaction and violence’, Afghanistan’s experience demonstrates that armed conflict occurs in an ‘arena of grey outcomes’Footnote 9 in which, as even Clausewitz acknowledged, ‘the result is never final’.Footnote 10 A second point that the Afghan example illustrates is that not all rebel victories are the same. The rebel victories that Afghanistan experienced in 1992, 1996, 2001, and 2021 varied in important ways, with differing impacts on subsequent developments. The assortment of rebel groups that achieved victory in 1992 faced no serious threat from unreconciled members of the defeated regime, but the fragmented nature of their wartime resistance fuelled years of vicious infighting. By contrast, the Taliban captured power in 1996 as a single, unified group.Footnote 11 Although they were spared the ruinous infighting that had plagued the mujahideen before them, the Taliban’s defeated adversaries managed to retreat to a remote corner of the country and maintain a determined armed resistance for several years.Footnote 12 The Northern Alliance’s victory in 2001 would have been unlikely in the absence of direct intervention from the United States. This dependence on foreign military support was crucial in subsequent years, as the security of the new regime continued to be underwritten by external actors. External dependence was starkly illustrated in 2021, when the Afghan regime fell to the Taliban within months of the United States’ withdrawal.
Despite the often-inconclusive nature of rebel victory and the fact that it occurs in different ways, much of the literature on civil war termination and peace durability tends to treat it uniformly as a homogeneous category. Recognising the heterogeneity of rebel victory is crucial for a more nuanced understanding of how post-war environments may be affected by the different ways in which wars actually end. One prominent study asserts, for instance, that ‘victorious armies are typically large, disciplined, and well-equipped’Footnote 13 and, therefore, manage to consolidate control in the aftermath of the conflict; however, this assertion is true only on some occasions. It is certainly the case, for example, that the victorious Nationalists of the Spanish civil war commanded a large and well-equipped army, but the same can hardly be said of the Seleka rebels who seized power in the Central African Republic in 2013. By the end of the Spanish civil war, Franco’s army comprised over 350,000 combatants and had ‘unchallenged control of the skies’ and a ‘a field-gun for every ten yards of front’.Footnote 14 By contrast, the Seleka rebels, described by the International Crisis GroupFootnote 15 as ‘a heterogeneous consortium of malcontents’, fought their way to power with an assortment of mainly looted small armsFootnote 16 and lost control over the country within just months of their takeover.Footnote 17 The point here is not to draw a frivolous comparison between Spain and the Central African Republic but, rather, to illustrate that a failure to take account of the varying nature of ‘rebel victory’ can obscure our ability to investigate how the achievements, processes, and relationships that enable some rebel groups to ‘win’ civil wars can influence developments in the post-war period.
This article contributes to our current understanding of rebel victory by advancing a multidimensional conceptual framework for analysing rebel victories based on variance observed across three dimensions: (1) the residual threat posed by the defeated regime; (2) external support for the rebels; and (3) rebel fragmentation. These dimensions, collectively referred to as the ‘conditions’ of victory, were informed by an extensive historical review of over 20 cases of rebel victory in the post-1945 environment.Footnote 18 The three dimensions, each of which is best viewed on a continuum, emerged inductively as common factors which had a clear bearing on the extent to which countries continued to experience violent instability in the post-war period. Broadly speaking, their theoretical relevance is grounded in their propensity to exert a strong influence on a victorious rebel group’s ability to consolidate authority in the immediate post-war period.Footnote 19 This is important because civil wars involve the violent fragmentation of political authority, and the continued violent contestation of authority is also a common characteristic of many post-civil war environments.Footnote 20 Consolidating authority in the post-war period is undoubtedly a key priority for victorious rebel groups, and their ability to do so is expected to, in turn, affect the likelihood that a country will continue to experience violent instability in the aftermath of a rebel victory. Three theoretical assertions corresponding to each dimension are advanced:
(1) The greater the residual threat posed by a defeated regime, the more likely it is that victorious rebels will face an immediate armed challenge to their rule, increasing the levels of authority contestation and, hence, the likelihood of violent post-war instability.
(2) Rebel groups which capture power with significant levels of external support are more likely to experience armed challenges to their rule and will be less likely to successfully suppress these, therefore increasing the levels of authority contestation and the likelihood of post-war instability.
(3) Rebel groups that win wars under fragmented conditions are more likely to experience immediate armed challenge to their rule, increasing the levels of authority contestation and the likelihood of post-war instability.
The current literature on civil war outcomes does underscore the relevance of each of these dimensions. For example, among others, Hartzell has noted that victory for one side does not inevitably entail the complete destruction of the other;Footnote 21 Lyons has commented on the propensity for external support for rebels to lead to weak ‘accidental victors’;Footnote 22 and numerous authors have extensively explored the phenomenon of rebel group fragmentation in civil war.Footnote 23 This article builds on this previous research by bringing the three dimensions together in an integrated framework that provides an analytical blueprint for assessing their influence on violent instability in the post-war period.
After describing and discussing the relevance of each dimension, as well as the influence that they can have on political instability in the post-war period, the article demonstrates the analytical utility of the conceptual framework by applying it to the rebel victories that occurred in the Central African Republic (CAR) in 2003 and 2013. The CAR was selected to illustrate the framework’s utility because it displays within-case variation across the three dimensions of interest (residual threat posed by the defeated regime; external support for the rebels; rebel fragmentation).
Before proceeding, however, it is necessary to first explain why rebel victories are an important topic worthy of study in their own right and to provide an overview of how the concept has been defined in the literature to date. Many studies of post-war peace durability treat civil war outcome as a categorical independent variable.Footnote 24 This enables comparison of the effects of different civil war outcome types (victory, defeat, negotiated settlement) on the durability of the ensuing peace. Other studies have sought to investigate how variation among cases of the same outcome type can influence post-war developments. Thus far, however, these studies have focused primarily on negotiated settlements,Footnote 25 reflecting, perhaps, the fact that these are the most common form of civil war termination as well as a normative preference for this outcome type.Footnote 26
It is important that this body of work is expanded to include a focus on other outcome types, including rebel victory. This is because, despite claims that rebel victories result in a particularly stable outcome,Footnote 27 in many situations they have not heralded peace. Violence may emanate from victorious rebels themselves. In Cambodia, for example, millions of civilians were killed by the Khmer Rouge in the years following their capture of power in 1975.Footnote 28 In other cases, violence may result from renewed fighting between the victors and their ‘defeated’ opponents, such as in Nicaragua where, with support from the United States, the defeated Guardia Nacional regrouped to form the core of the Fuerze Democrática Nicaragüense and waged a fierce war against the new Sandinista government.Footnote 29 Alternatively, rebel victory may occur in an environment where nobody can claim monopoly over the means of violence, with multiple armed groups competing in pursuit of economic and political objectives, as was the case in the aftermath of civil wars in Chad,Footnote 30 the CAR,Footnote 31 and Libya.Footnote 32 If we wish to understand such variation, then it is necessary to accept that not all rebel victories are the same. Understanding the dimensions along which they vary – a key objective of this article – is a prerequisite for studying rebel victories on their own and the different forms of violence which can emerge in their aftermath. Unpacking the complexity of rebel victories will also shed light on the broader concept of what it means to ‘win’ a civil war. An important oversight of the contemporary literature on victory is that it focuses almost exclusively on wars between and not within states.Footnote 33 Even those studies which examine the ambiguities of victory given the modern challenges of counter-insurgency, the use of privatised military force, post-war reconstruction and justice, or drone warfare tend to do so from a distinctly interstate perspective.Footnote 34
Moreover, those studies and datasets that do incorporate a focus on victory in civil war do not reflect its complexity. For example, ToftFootnote 35 defines victories as ‘situations in which one side in a war is defeated’ which enable the victor to determine ‘the type and composition of any post-war government’ without consulting the defeated party. This definition implies a level of capacity and control that victorious rebels often lack. The Upsalla Conflict Data Programme’s Conflict Termination Dataset defines victories as cases in which rebels ‘oust the government, or comprehensively defeat or eliminate the opposition, who may succumb to the power of the other through capitulation or public announcement’.Footnote 36 This definition implies a degree of finality to rebel victories which is rarely borne out by reality. As this article makes clear, ousted governments are not often ‘comprehensively’ defeated and rarely renounce their presumed right to rule. The Correlates of WarFootnote 37 dataset has no working definition of victory at all but, instead, relies on ‘the consensus among the acknowledged specialists in deciding which side “won” each war’. More recent research into rebel victories by Lyons,Footnote 38 Martin,Footnote 39 Thaler,Footnote 40 and others has explored the different approaches to state-building that victorious rebels have adopted in the post-war period but does not offer a precise and explicit definition of rebel victory or an assessment of the different ways in which rebel groups can win civil wars. Thus, more conceptual clarity surrounding victory in civil war is needed, especially considering the well-documented fact that civil wars are now by far the most common form of organised political violence.Footnote 41 Understanding what victory means in civil war is therefore crucial. Given the fundamental differences between interstate and intrastate warfare, frameworks developed to analyse military and political success – and, hence, victory – in interstate wars are of only limited value when applied to intrastate war.
Three dimensions of rebel victory
Rebel victory is a heterogeneous phenomenon that is best captured across multiple dimensions which help us grasp the variability in post-conflict outcomes. This section advances three key dimensions along which rebel victory may vary and discusses their theoretical relevance to the post-war period: (1) the residual threat posed by the defeated regime; (2) external support to rebels; (3) rebel fragmentation.
Residual threat posed by the defeated regime
Victory typically implies ‘the ability of the winner to impose its will on the loser’.Footnote 42 In the context of rebel victory in civil war, this can be understood as the ability of a victorious group to assume control of the state and shape the post-war political order. In Toft’sFootnote 43 words, ‘following a decisive military victory, one side gains control of all state resources and, crucially, the ability to set the political and economic agenda’. This is rarely the case, however. Victory in civil war does not invariably result in unfettered state control, nor does it always confer an unconstrained ability on the winners to set the post-war agenda. One reason for this is that ostensibly defeated incumbents can retain the ability to pose an immediate residual threat to the victors.
When the defeated party does pose a residual threat to the victors, the post-war environment is characterised by intense contestation of authority; consequently, the potential for renewed violence is greatly increased, as the nominally ‘defeated’ party retains both organisational coherence and military capacity to violently resist the new government. This dimension essentially captures the inherent ambiguity and inconclusiveness of victory in civil war.Footnote 44 At times, victory will fail to ‘demarcate the threshold between war and peace’, because ‘armies that have ostensibly been defeated melt away only to re-emerge and carry on the fight by irregular means’.Footnote 45 In civil wars, victory does not always imply the complete organisational destruction of the defeated party; in many cases, a significant proportion of a defeated incumbent’s armed forces and leadership remains intact, finding temporary shelter in territory not controlled by the victorious group, or perhaps across the border in a neighbouring country.Footnote 46 In the same vein, Liu has recently noted that, after rebel victory, the ‘postwar political arena is divided into rebel government strongholds, where the new rebel government has strong ties; unsecured terrain, where no armed groups sustain wartime ties; and rival strongholds, where the rebel government’s rivals have strong ties’.Footnote 47
A ‘comprehensive’ rebel victory would imply very little or no residual threat from the defeated group. This would approximate Toft’sFootnote 48 description of a ‘radical disequilibrium’, in which ‘military operations result in the destruction of the enemy’ and the ‘number of survivors is confined to the one remaining side’. In such cases, the potential for renewed violence in the aftermath of rebel victory is reduced. In practice, this would necessitate ‘not only the disarming of all but one faction in a civil war but also efforts to destroy the organizational identity of the losers and inhibit the organization of dissident groups within the future’.Footnote 49
The post-war repercussions of residual threats are illustrated by numerous historical examples of rebel groups claiming victory only to be faced with an immediate challenge from their displaced opponents. For example, when Mao Ze Dong declared the People’s Republic of China in Beijing in 1949, his army ‘did not effectively control the area along the Burmese border’, which was mountainous and densely forested and ‘provided the defeated KMT armies in Yunnan Province an excellent place to which to retreat’.Footnote 50 With assistance from the exiled KMT government in Taiwan and the United States,Footnote 51 up to 30,000 soldiers were able to establish a foothold in Burma, from where they launched repeated raids into southern China.Footnote 52 In Nicaragua, when the Sandinistas captured Managua in 1979, thousands of soldiers from the defeated Guardia Nacional ‘fled to neighboring Honduras to form the nucleus of the future Contra movement’,Footnote 53 which would plunge the country into a renewed civil war. In Chad, when Hissené Habré’s Forces Armées du Nord captured N’Djamena in 1982, the defeated government of Goukouni Oeddei fled to the north of the country, where they established a rebellious shadow government with military and financial support from neighbouring Libya.Footnote 54
One reason that a defeated army may pose a residual threat is that third-party support may be provided to ousted incumbents in the immediate aftermath of rebel victory. Following rebel victory in 1986 in Uganda, for instance, the Sudanese government provided support to defeated government soldiers, which enabled them to renew hostilities with the victorious National Resistance Army.Footnote 55 In neighbouring Rwanda, France offered military and financial aid to the government of Juvenal Habyarimana in its war against the Rwandese Patriotic Front and continued to do so after the rebels had captured Kigali, by intervening directly to ensure that remnants of the regime were able to flee to neighbouring Zaire with their weapons.Footnote 56 In each of these cases, the result of continued external support to defeated incumbents was large-scale political violence. In other cases, external support to incumbents was withdrawn in the immediate run-up to or aftermath of defeat. For example, the Soviet Union provided military assistance to governments battling insurgencies in Afghanistan and Ethiopia. After nearly 10 years of stalemate in Afghanistan, the Soviets withdrew their forces in the late 1980s,Footnote 57 paving the way for the mujahideen’s victory in 1991. Similarly, in the run-up to the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) victory in Ethiopia, Soviet president Mikhail Gorbachev announced in the late 1980s that support for the embattled Mengistu regime would be withdrawn.Footnote 58 In these cases, the withdrawal of foreign support for incumbents clearly facilitated rebel victories and almost certainly helped prevent remnants of the defeated regimes from organising counter-attacks in the immediate aftermath.
Equally, there are historical examples in which the absence of residual threat from defeated incumbents helped victorious rebels to consolidate authority in the post-war period, thereby reducing the incidence of renewed violence. This occurred in instances when rebel victories did result in a more ‘radical’ disequilibrium, and the defeated incumbents retained little or no capacity to pose a security threat to the new regime. In Costa Rica, for example, José Figueres’s Ejercíto de Liberación Nacional captured the capital San José in 1948 and had ‘complete military control of the country’.Footnote 59 Remnants of the defeated government army were ‘marched to the airport in the outskirts of San José where they were disarmed and dismissed’.Footnote 60 When the coalition of rebels organised as the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic captured power in 1991, the defeated army, among the largest in Africa at the time, ‘vanished into thin air’, enabling the insurgents to demand ‘that the decapitated government accept an unconditional surrender’.Footnote 61 In 1971, when the Indian military intervened decisively to enable Mukti Bahini rebels capture power in East Pakistan (now Bangladesh), the West Pakistani army surrendered unconditionally and withdrew from the territory.Footnote 62 In each of these instances, the defeated party posed no immediate residual threat to the victorious rebels.
External support to rebels
Foreign governments may intervene in civil wars for a variety of reasons, and this can have lasting repercussions in the post-war period. External actors may support belligerents in the hope of promoting a desired outcome, they may intervene in search of profit, and, on occasion, they may become involved out of a genuine desire to put an end to the fighting.Footnote 63 As such, many rebel groups that succeed in capturing power do so with significant assistance from external patrons. This support may be direct, including the participation of foreign soldiers, or indirect, through means such as ‘supplying the belligerents with arms, money, [and] military advisors’.Footnote 64 For example, it was a combination of direct and indirect intervention by Fascist Germany and Italy on the side of Franco’s rebellion during the Spanish civil war that is widely held to have ‘tipped the balance in favor of a nationalist victory’.Footnote 65 Similarly, in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge were helped to victory by political and military support provided by governments of China and North Vietnam.Footnote 66
Rebel victories, therefore, often involve an important ‘external’ dimension, crucial for describing how rebel victories vary. Specifically, it is important to consider whether victorious rebels received external support during the civil war, because the legacy of external involvement often has clear repercussions in the post-war period. Specifically, wartime external support to rebels carries the potential to increase the likelihood of post-war instability for three related reasons.
First, rebels whose capture of power was enabled by the support of third-party actors are more likely to experience a domestic legitimacy and authority deficit in the wake of their victory; hence, environments of victorious rebels who gained power with foreign assistance are likely to be characterised by acute authority contestation in the aftermath of the conflict. This is attributable partly to the tendency of external powers to intervene in civil wars in pursuit of their own objectives.Footnote 67 This can result in a perception among a population that their new rulers may not have their best interests at heart. For example, the prominent role played by the Rwandese military in the rebel AFDL’s victory in 1997 in Zaire resulted in a widespread perception that the victors were ‘an occupying force, with interests other than those of the Congolese people at heart’.Footnote 68 Essentially, the inherent lack of legitimacy for rebels who gained power predominantly with external support is likely to erode their ability to consolidate their authority and, hence, is likely to produce greater instability in the post-conflict environment as their rule will be constantly challenged by various authority claimants.
Secondly, foreign governments that supported rebel groups to victory may retain a strong interest in influencing the political trajectory of the new regime, and this may, on occasion, result in violent confrontation if the interests of the victorious rebels and their foreign sponsors do not coincide. Continuing with the case of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), the victory of the Alliance des Forces Démocratiques pour la Libération du Congo (AFDL) in 1997 was made possible only by the direct participation of the Rwandese military, who fostered the creation of the rebel group with a view to installing a friendly regime in Kinshasa.Footnote 69 Rwanda’s support to the rebels was highly effective, and the AFDL captured power rapidly. In the months following the AFDL’s victory, however, the Rwandese continued to play a highly visible role in the new government, to the great consternation of many Congolese citizens, who saw them not as liberators, but, rather, invaders.Footnote 70 Relations between the victorious rebels and their erstwhile allies broke down rapidly. When the Congolese government demanded the expulsion of all Rwandese troops from the country in mid-1998, it triggered a renewed outbreak of civil and interstate conflict which saw the active military involvement of virtually all of the DRC’s neighbouring countries and resulted in millions of deaths. In Afoaku’s words, ‘Congo’s new king had turned the king-makers into his most bitter enemies’.Footnote 71
Thirdly, rebels that were dependent on external support for capturing power are less likely to have sufficient autonomous military capacity to ward off threats to their authority in the post-war period. Lyons,Footnote 72 for example, has argued that weak rebel movements that succeed in overthrowing incumbent regimes with external support are, in effect, ‘accidental victors’ that ‘struggle to consolidate power and overcome rivals’ in the post-war period. Such dependencies can, moreover, further diminish the legitimacy of a new regime by reinforcing a perception that the incoming rulers are in fact the puppets of foreign meddlers. This process was well illustrated by the example of the Northern Alliance’s victory in Afghanistan in 2001, which would have been unthinkable in the absence of American intervention. In the aftermath of the Northern Alliance’s takeover, the new government remained entirely dependent on their wartime benefactors for security, with the new president himself remarking that he was a ‘guest in his country’ without power.Footnote 73
Rebel fragmentation
Rebellions are rarely fought by a single, unified group of insurgents. Rather, civil wars often ‘exhibit rival factions and multiple challengers competing for common and sometimes conflicting goals’,Footnote 74 and governments may be confronted with fragmented conflict landscapes characterised by multiple, simultaneous insurgencies.Footnote 75 In some cases, this is because a nominally ‘unitary’ rebel group becomes divided along competing factional lines, as was clearly the case in Chad, where the Front de Libération Nationale du Tchad (FROLINAT) splintered into multiple factions that spent as much time fighting among themselves as they did against the government.Footnote 76 In such cases, the factions remain at least superficially linked in that they are ‘mobilized around a collective identity in the pursuit of interests and common fate it engenders’.Footnote 77 For all the infighting and hostility between the various factions of FROLINAT, they all claimed to act in the interests of northern Chadians against perceived domination and misrule by southerners.Footnote 78 In a loose sense, then, they can be conceived of as belonging to an overarching ‘movement’. In other cases, fragmented civil war landscapes do not result from the splintering of a single group. Governments may in fact face multiple simultaneous insurgencies waged by different groups with differing agendas and demands, which may be unrelated or even incompatible. In both Ethiopia and Somalia, for example, multiple rebel groups emerged in different regions with idiosyncratic (and principally ethnocentric) demands and leadership structures.Footnote 79
Wartime fragmentation is an important dimension of rebel victory because, if present, rebels may seize power in an environment characterised by ‘pluralized capacities for violence’.Footnote 80 In effect, this means that, while a given rebel group or coalition of groups may have succeeded in displacing the sitting regime, they nevertheless will not command a monopoly over violence. Instead, they may find themselves presiding over a febrile landscape populated by multiple armed groups, willing and ready to employ violence in pursuit of political and economic objectives should they deem it necessary.Footnote 81 Wartime fragmentation within a victorious rebel movement fosters a post-conflict environment where authority is fiercely contested, as various factions vie for power and influence in the new political order. This contestation can be visible in multiple ways, including direct and indirect military challenges to the victorious rebels’ authority, the establishment of alternative structures of governance, and the broader undermining of victorious rebels’ state-building efforts. Therefore, rebel groups that capture victory under fragmented conditions are much more likely to experience immediate challenges to their rule, thereby heightening the likelihood of a return to violence.
A clear example of a fragmented rebel victory is provided by the case of Somalia, where capacities for organised violence were so pluralised when the longtime dictator Siad Barre was finally defeated in 1991 that it was unclear who had actually ‘won’. Following Somalia’s humiliating defeat to Ethiopia in the 1977 Ogaden war, numerous armed groups emerged to challenge Barre’s regime, each representing different regional and clan interests.Footnote 82 These opposition groups proved exceptionally reluctant to cooperate against their common enemy. Two of the largest organisations, for example, the Somali National Movement (SNM) and the Somali Salvation Democratic Front (SSDF), were ‘separate and mostly rival organizations, narrowly organized along clan lines and competing for Ethiopian backing’.Footnote 83 In the months leading up to Barre’s defeat, there were some signs of increased cooperation. In 1990, the United Somali Congress (USC), the Somali Patriotic Front (SPM), and the SNM agreed not to ‘negotiate with the regime and not to act to create a new political leadership without consulting one another’.Footnote 84 They nevertheless continued to fight ‘to seize state power and the resources and privileges of Barre’s old political networks for themselves and their home communities’.Footnote 85 One clear result of this fragmentation was extreme violent disorder when Barre fled Mogadishu in a tank in January 1991, following the defeat of his presidential guard. By September, rival factions of the USC were engaged in open warfare in Mogadishu, while they simultaneously sought to eliminate the SPM and the SSDF and ward off a residual threat presented by ex-president Barre, who had managed to regroup and reorganise his supporters in the south of the country.Footnote 86
When ‘unfragmented’ victories occur, rebels capture power in a situation which more closely approximates a monopoly over the means for organised violence. In these scenarios, the contestation of authority is less acute. As a consequence, rebels are typically better equipped to address any residual threat posed by elements of the defeated regime, should this exist, thereby reducing the likelihood of post-war instability. Examples of ‘unfragmented’ victories include those won by rebels in Cuba, China, and Rwanda. In each case, rebel groups captured power as relatively unified actors. They all faced challenges from unreconciled elements of the regimes that they defeated but, for the most part, were able to withstand these with some success. Fidel Castro’s revolutionary regime in Cuba faced attacks from both exiles and internal counter-revolutionaries but had successfully eliminated both threats by the mid-1960s through the establishment of mass surveillance and security organisations.Footnote 87 In China, Mao’s new government rapidly eliminated any residual threat posed by the defeated Chinese Nationalist Party (GMD), violently repressed emergent nationalist movements in the ‘peripheral’ regions of Xinjiang and Tibet, and launched periodic campaigns to purge society of perceived counter-revolutionaries and class enemies.Footnote 88 The Rwandese Patriotic Front was confronted by a serious armed threat from the forces of the defeated regime who had regrouped across the border in Zaire but effectively repelled incursions into Rwandese territory through an extremely violent counter-insurgency campaign, which saw thousands of civilians killed.Footnote 89
These cases of ‘unfragmented’ rebel victory raise an important point, which is that the unity and cohesion of the victorious party does not guarantee a more peaceful aftermath. In fact, many countries that experienced ‘unfragmented’ rebel victories in subsequent years went on to record just as much, if not more, violence than countries which witnessed ‘fragmented’ victories. The difference lies in the character of the violence that occurred. Countries in which fragmented rebel movements defeated an incumbent regime often saw persistent infighting among the victors over the spoils of war. When united rebel movements captured power, post-war violence was often the result of militarily powerful state’s efforts to eliminate any remaining residual threat posed by the defeated regime and repress any other emerging challenges to its rule.
Demonstrating the utility of the framework
To demonstrate the analytical utility of the proposed multidimensional framework, the section below applies it to the two cases of rebel victory from the CAR. The CAR has been selected because it experienced 2 rebel victories occurring within 10 years of each other, each displaying a different combination of victory ‘conditions’. This provides suitable variation along the dimensions of interest, while also enabling a certain degree of control for other (demographic, geographic, cultural, etc.) factors, given that rebel victories occurred in the same country. The purpose of the following case studies is to illustrate how the proposed framework can be used to systematically describe variation across the dimensions of interest, and demonstrate the potential for exploring how such variation may influence post-civil war outcomes. Our multidimensional framework can be applied beyond the two cases under inquiry to arrive at generalisations about how different victory conditions can impact (in)stability in the aftermath of civil wars.
Central African Republic: Bozizé’s rebel victory in 2003
In March 2003, a small group of rebels overthrew the democratically elected government of President Ange-Felix Patassé in the CAR. The rebels were led by François Bozizé, a renegade military general who had fled to France following a failed coup attempt in 2001.Footnote 90 In this section, the framework outlined above is used to analyse the ‘conditions’ of Bozizé’s victory in 2003 and to explore the influence of these on its aftermath. The same framework is then applied to the victory of the Seleka rebel movement, who overthrew Bozizé’s government in 2013.
Residual threat (low)
The defeated military of the outgoing regime presented very little residual threat to Bozizé’s new presidency. Indeed, the CAR military had done virtually nothing to defend the capital Bangui from the rebels’ advance. According to a contemporaneous report from the United Nations peace-building support office in CAR at the time, much of the country’s military personnel had already fled to neighbouring states in the wake of an abortive coup in May 2001, a full two years before the rebels’ victory.Footnote 91 In a last-ditch attempt to save his presidency, Patassé drafted the support of Libyan soldiers and mercenary rebels from the Mouvement de Libération du Congo (MLC) in neighbouring DRC.Footnote 92 This was one of only very few instances in which a sitting government hired rebels from a nearby state to defend itself against a domestic armed challenge. Ultimately, Patassé’s mercenary support was insufficient to stop the advance of Bozizé’s rebels. In the immediate aftermath of Bozizé’s victory, members of the military who had fled in 2001 were given amnesty and integrated into the new army.Footnote 93
External support (high)
Bozizé’s rebels captured power thanks to extensive regional support. Even the composition of Bozizé’s rebellion was largely foreign, as most of his soldiers were from neighbouring Chad.Footnote 94 In addition, Bozizé’s campaign was facilitated by several other countries. From his exile in Paris, the French authorities gave Bozizé free passage to Chad, from where he invaded the CAR with financial and military support from the Chadian president and his counterparts in the DRC and the Republic of Congo.Footnote 95
By contrast, external support to Patassé’s government, in both the run-up to and aftermath of its defeat, was notably absent. As noted above, the French government, who were the go-to allies of all previous CAR governments, had signalled their approval of Bozizé’s rebellion, and Patassé’s beleaguered presidency faced only hostility from regional powers, forcing him to rely on mercenaries as a last-ditch means of self-defence. Bozizé’s victory and unconstitutional seizure of power was condemned by the United Nations representative in the country,Footnote 96 but no third parties intervened in any sort of bid to shore up Patassé’s prospects of fighting his way back to power. International peacekeepers who had been deployed in the country since the late 1990s to stem unrest sparked by a series of military mutinies did not intervene to prevent Bozizé’s seizure of power.
Rebel fragmentation (low)
Bozizé’s rebellion was not a fragmented movement. As discussed, most of its fighters were foreign, but there was no evidence to suggest that there was any organisational infighting among the movement’s members during the short war that brought them to power. Moreover, at the time that Bozizé’s rebels captured power, they were the only organised, armed non-state actor seeking to violently overthrow the incumbent regime.
The aftermath of the conflict
The ‘conditions’ of rebel victory in the CAR in 2003 described above (low residual threat; high external support; low rebel fragmentation) had a clear influence on political and security developments throughout the following decade. The defeated regime’s military posed no residual threat to the victors, and, therefore, the new government was not confronted with the immediate challenge of an organised attempt by the losers of the war to violently recapture power. Because they had been the only armed group contesting the government’s power, Bozizé’s new government also did not have to immediately contend with multiple violent non-state actors vying for a stake in the new political order. Hence, with respect to these two dimensions (residual threat and fragmentation), Bozizé’s new government benefited from relatively favorable ‘victory conditions’.
However, the almost complete dependency of Bozizé’s rebellion on foreign support became painfully clear in the years following its victory. Within just a matter of days, the rebel soldiers that had brought Bozizé to power set about plundering the capital Bangui in search of reward for their efforts.Footnote 97 Unable to control the situation, Bozizé was forced to request additional support from the Chadian President Idris Déby, who sent 500 extra soldiers to underwrite the security of the new regime.Footnote 98 These additional ‘Chadian troops brought in as reinforcement helped to put an end to the looting in the capital city and to carry out vigorous disarmament operations there’.Footnote 99 Thereafter, Bozizé’s government remained vulnerable to the demands of foreign fighters and mercenaries that had helped him to power. In 2004, for instance, ex-participants in Bozizé’s rebellion demanded further compensation for their previous support, resulting in violent confrontations with the new regime’s nascent army.Footnote 100
Bozizé had captured power thanks to the support of a small group of unscrupulous and mainly foreign mercenary soldiers, and in the longer term this proved to be an inadequate basis for extending his regime’s control and legitimacy across CAR. Despite the ‘unquestionably fair elections of May 2005’,Footnote 101 which Bozizé comfortably won, the government proved unable to effectively quell growing unrest across the hinterlands of the country. Initially, this involved community-based militias that were hostile to the new regime, but by 2006, political entrepreneurs (including some members of the government ousted by Bozizé’s regime) had taken advantage of the emergent grassroots resentment and formed two organised armed movements, the Armée Populaire pour la Restauration de la Démocratie (APRD) and the Union des Forces Démocratiques pour le Rassemblement (UFDR).Footnote 102 Over the next five years, Bozizé’s government met these challenges with a counterproductive mix of extreme repression, which included mass violence perpetrated against civilians suspected of sympathising with the insurgents, and lavish yet almost completely ineffectual peace-building and Disarmament, Demobilisation and Reintegration (DDR) programmes sponsored by the United Nations and other international actors.Footnote 103
In 2011, presidential elections were held which Bozizé was widely perceived to have won in a flagrantly fraudulent manner, giving further impetus to the armed rebellion against the government.Footnote 104 In March of the following year, leaders from the various armed groups opposing the government met in Niger, and ‘formed a heterogeneous coalition of rebels from Chad, Sudan, CAR and a few other countries called Seleka’.Footnote 105 The members of Seleka had little in common, united only by their ‘uncompromising rejection of the Bozizé regime and the prospect of sharing among them the spoils of the country’.Footnote 106 Within a year of its formation, the Seleka coalition had defeated the CAR military and captured Bangui.
Central African Republic: The Seleka victory of 2013
Residual threat (high)
Unlike in 2003, when the desertion of the national army two years earlier had forced Patassé to rely on foreign mercenaries for defence against Bozizé’s rebels, in early 2013 the CAR did have a functioning, albeit rather ineffectual, army. The residual threat posed in the wake of Seleka’s victory by the defeated government army, the Forces Armées Centrafricaines (FACA), is somewhat challenging to assess. According to the United States’ Congressional Research Service, the FACA had numbered roughly 7,000 personnel, many of whom deserted or were forcibly disarmed following the rebel takeover.Footnote 107 Lombard has similarly noted that, in the face of the rebel advance, FACA, ‘not a particularly fearsome force at the best of times, effectively dissolved’.Footnote 108
That said, it is quite clear from developments in the immediate aftermath of the Seleka takeover that while the FACA appeared to have disbanded, they remained a residual threat insofar as they continued to constitute a network of armed loyalists of the defeated regime, able to be reactivated at short notice. Multiple sources, for instance, have indicated that ex-members of FACA and other Bozizé loyalists played an integral part in the ‘anti-Balaka’ armed opposition that emerged in the months following the Seleka takeover. A report by a United Nations panel of experts noted, for example, that the first armed attacks against the new Seleka government were conducted in early September ‘by militia then described by media as ‘pro-Bozizé armed men’, while at the same time, ‘FACA and Gendarmes personnel loyal to former resident François Bozizé were then recruiting youths from local communities’.Footnote 109 Isaacs-MartinFootnote 110 similarly reported that Bozizé’s supporters rapidly mobilised the ‘“Front pour le Retour de l’ordre Constitutionnel en Centrafrique” (FROCCA), a militia composed of former government soldiers’, which helped to organise the anti-Balaka resistance. Finally, a report by the International Criminal Court noted ex-FACA’s role in organising the anti-Balaka movement and, in particular, also reported that ‘as a result of the integration of ex-FACA into the anti-Balaka, the group has, taken on a structure similar to the FACA’, and that ‘a majority of anti-Balaka commanders are former FACA members’.Footnote 111 The growing organisation of the anti-Balaka enabled them to stage a large-scale attack on the capital Bangui in December 2013.Footnote 112
External support (low)
Again, in contrast to the victory conditions of 2003, there was no direct military support provided by third parties to either the incumbents or rebels in the lead-up to Seleka’s 2013 victory. According to Lombard and Carayannis,Footnote 113 ‘whereas Bozizé had taken power through a kind of regional gentleman’s agreement that included French support, Djotodia did not benefit from such regional cooperation’. On the contrary, Seleka’s capture of power met with almost universal condemnation, and the African Union ‘suspended the CAR’s membership of the Union and imposed sanctions on seven Seleka leaders, including travel bans and the freezing of their assets’.Footnote 114 Beyond condemnation of Seleka’s usurpation of power, there was no military or financial support provided to Bozizé in the immediate aftermath of his government’s defeat.Footnote 115
Rebel fragmentation (high)
Seleka was a loose and temporary coalition of separate and largely antagonistic groups.Footnote 116 According to an International Crisis Group (ICG) report written at the time of the rebel takeover, the two principal groups comprising the Seleka coalition were the Union des Forces Démocratiques pour le Rassemblement (UFDR) and the Convention of Patriots for Justice and Peace (CPJP), alongside several other more minor groups. Importantly, the two main groups were long-standing enemies with different ethnic constituencies, with a history of hostile competition over the control of land and natural resources.Footnote 117 As soon as Bozizé’s government captured power and Djotodia declared himself president, the Seleka coalition fell apart.Footnote 118 According to the ICG, the group ‘fractured and many of its senior figures made death threats against the putschist head of state Michel Djotodia’.Footnote 119
The aftermath
Under these starkly different conditions (high residual threat, low external support, and high rebel fragmentation), the violence that CAR experienced in the aftermath of the Seleka takeover was of a greater magnitude than anything that had occurred in the preceding decades. Unrest began almost immediately and, initially, was of a spontaneous, anarchic nature. As the new president Michel Djotodia was being sworn in ‘outside the presidential palace, pandemonium reigned in Bangui’, as ‘unfettered by a chain of command or any other disciplinary restraint, the latest crop of “liberators” was seeking revenge and cashing in on their victory’.Footnote 120 While ‘many people in Bangui say they cheered when Seleka arrived in March 2013’, they ‘quickly became disillusioned’ as ‘robbery and violence were both rampant’.Footnote 121 Outside the capital, Seleka sought to consolidate its hold over the country, violently supressing perceived resistance through frequent attacks on civilians, particularly in those regions associated with former president Bozizé’s ethnic group.Footnote 122
By June 2013, just three months after the rebel takeover, Seleka was facing more organised resistance from the anti-Balaka groups.Footnote 123 As discussed above, the anti-Balaka groups, comprised initially of grassroots defence militias, were given greater organisational capacity when they were joined by ex-members of the FACA. Ominously, the conflict between the Seleka and anti-Balaka soon assumed sectarian overtones. According to a report by a United Nations panel of experts, the significant numbers of Muslim Chadian and Sudanese soldiers within Seleka ranks led most Central Africans to perceive ‘the rebel coalition as a foreign group that was subjugating the majority of the population’.Footnote 124 In September 2013, just six months after declaring himself president, Djotodia had lost control and declared that the Seleka coalition was disbanded.Footnote 125 This did nothing to diminish the violence, and as the Seleka ‘collapsed and fragmented into factions, half of Bangui’s population fled the fighting and a fifth of the national population was displaced’.Footnote 126 Fighting between the ex-Seleka and the anti-Balaka continued throughout 2013, reaching an apex in December, when the anti-Balaka ‘launched an apparently well-coordinated attack on Bangui which first targeted Seleka positions before beginning retaliatory attacks on Muslims throughout the city’.Footnote 127 Data drawn from the UCDPFootnote 128 indicate that 3,332 combatants and civilians were killed in the nine months following the Seleka’s takeover. This is likely to be an underestimate and certainly does not capture the extent of displacement and damage to infrastructure resulting from the conflict.
The magnitude of the violence, described by some commentators as borderline ‘genocidal’,Footnote 129 provoked large-scale military and political intervention by France, the African Union, and the United Nations. Djotodia was strong-armed into resigning by the Chadian president,Footnote 130 peacekeeping troops were deployed, and the interveners established a transitional government, paving the way for later elections. In the short run, the international intervention in the CAR did succeed in reducing levels of violence and restoring some semblance of democratic (if still rather ineffective) government. However, the CAR has yet to return to a condition that could be accurately described as peace. Numerous peace initiatives and two general elections have failed to prevent violence from simmering throughout the decade.Footnote 131 In early 2021, ex-president Bozizé made a dramatic return to the centre stage at the head of a rebel alliance called the Coalition of Patriots for Change, who together control much of the country and have made tentative advances towards Bangui.Footnote 132
Discussion
Comparing rebel victories in the CAR in 2003 and 2013 demonstrates the analytical utility of the multidimensional framework presented in this article. Applying the framework to the two cases enables investigation of how differing ‘victory conditions’ affected post-war developments in each instance, particularly in relation to authority contestation and post-war stability and instability. Rebel victory in 2003 followed a small insurgency almost completely dependent on foreign support. The incumbent regime was defeated comprehensively and posed no residual threat to the victors. The country was, therefore, spared from the consequences of an immediate outbreak of ‘counter-revolutionary’ violence. That said, Bozizé’s was hardly a ‘popular’ rebellion. As discussed, his victory was enabled by the cooperation and support provided by a collection of regional and more distant powers. Bozizé’s new regime was thus confronted with the task of building a viable domestic constituency and legitimising its rule throughout the country. This was a tall order, given the widespread mistrust with which CAR citizens had come to view successive governments, each with an equally poor record of extremely poor governance, blatant corruption, and heavy-handed repression of dissent. Ultimately, these factors combined to undermine the legitimacy and authority of the regime, with serious consequences for peace and stability. In the end, Bozizé’s administration proved to be cut from the same cloth as its predecessors. Throughout his 10 years in power, opposition grew more violent and more organised. When regional powers withdrew support in early 2013, Bozizé’s government was quickly overrun by the Seleka rebels.
The conditions of Seleka’s victory in 2013 were markedly different from those of Bozizé’s in 2003. Most notably, the defeated armed forces of Bozizé’s ousted regime remained a serious residual threat in the immediate aftermath of Seleka’s victory; thus, authority contestation was indelibly etched in the emergent post-conflict environment, with deleterious consequences for internal order. In the months following Seleka’s takeover, ex-members of Bozizé’s armed forces helped organise and spearhead the anti-Balaka armed opposition, resulting in levels of violence that far outstripped in scale anything that the country had experienced before. Moreover, the Seleka was from the start a fragmented coalition of antagonistic groups and was therefore unable to formulate, let alone implement, a coordinated response to this challenge. Instead, the group fell apart almost as soon as it captured power, further complicating an already chaotic landscape. The CAR’s slide towards total anarchy was halted only the decisive military intervention of France and the African Union in 2014. Even so, the country continues to experience periodic political violence to this day.
Drawing on the theoretical discussion above and the evidence presented in the case studies, Table 1 below outlines the impact that the three identified dimensions of rebel victories can have on post-civil war (in)stability.
Summary of the dimensions and their influence on the aftermath of rebel victories
Table 1 Long description
The table links three dimensions of rebel victories to the likelihood and potential severity of violent instability afterward, contrasting low versus high levels. For residual threat, low levels mean the defeated regime’s forces are destroyed or surrender, easing consolidation; high levels mean surviving forces can regroup and keep fighting. Examples of low residual threat include Costa Rica 1948, Ethiopia 1991, and Bangladesh 1971, while high residual threat examples include Rwanda 1994, Nicaragua 1979, and China 1949. For fragmentation, low fragmentation implies a unified insurgency and a closer approximation to a monopoly on violence, reducing postwar contestation; high fragmentation implies multiple independent armed groups and higher risk of renewed violence. Low fragmentation examples include Rwanda 1994 and Costa Rica 1948; high fragmentation examples include Afghanistan in the 1990s, Somalia 1991, Chad 1982, and Libya 2011. For external support, low reliance on foreign backers is associated with stronger domestic legitimacy and fewer patron conflicts, while high reliance can weaken domestic support and create postwar disputes with former sponsors. Low external support examples include Uganda 1986 and Eritrea 1991; high external support examples include Libya 2011 and Afghanistan 2001. The table presents qualitative relationships and illustrative cases rather than quantified effect sizes.
Conclusion
The complexities of contemporary warfare have led academics and policymakers alike to question the meaning of ‘victory’ in the modern world. Much of this debate has focused on the increasingly rare phenomenon of interstate war. Comparatively little attention has been devoted to exploring the concept of victory in civil war despite the fact that, in recent decades, it has become, by far, the most prevalent and destructive form of organised political violence worldwide. Instead, studies of civil war have focused overwhelmingly on the durability of negotiated settlements, perhaps reflecting a normative stance among international observers and interveners that ‘winning’ and ‘losing’ are undesirable outcomes to be avoided at all costs. Yet civil wars are often ‘won’ and ‘lost’ – understanding how this happens is vital if we are to begin to navigate the complexities of post-conflict reconciliation and reconstruction.
This article has explored the ambiguity of victory in civil war by focusing on ‘rebel victory’, a loosely defined civil war outcome that has gained prominence in the literature because of its supposed ‘durability’. Far from constituting a uniform outcome, however, this article has argued that ‘rebel victory’ varies in ways which may have an important bearing on the aftermath of civil wars, and particularly the likelihood that a country will experience instability in the post-war period. The article proposed a multidimensional conceptualisation of ‘rebel victory’ which can be applied to analyse how ‘victory conditions’ vary across cases and described how this variation can affect post-war outcomes. Two cases of rebel victories from the Central African Republic (2003 and 2013) were employed to illustrate how variation in victory conditions can affect post-war (in)stability, particularly with respect to the character and magnitude of any organised violence that may occur. More broadly, a focus on these victory conditions can enable us to investigate under what circumstances power won through violent means continues to be violently contested, or why some successful rebellions are able to institutionalise their rule to the point where political actors may compete and interact using non-violent means.
