Can civil war give rise to democracy? On the face of it, this seems an implausible proposition. Much of the academic and popular literature in recent years has emphasized the destructive force of violent conflict on all aspects of state and society: it can create human rights and humanitarian atrocities, destroy institutions and infrastructure, displace families, drain the economy, unravel social networks, threaten regime survival, inundate countries with small arms, and breed fear and mistrust. These consequences appear directly inimical to the conditions needed for the emergence of a democratic state. Indeed, conventional wisdom holds that civil war tends to prod already unstable states down the path to state failure, creating serious security concerns not only for citizens within those states but also for the region and even the world (Helman 1992/1993; Rotberg 2002; Krasner and Pascual 2005; Patrick 2006). The enormity of the challenges that now beset countries such as Haiti, Cote d'Ivoire, Sudan, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria lend credence to these claims, so that to speak of democratization in the face of civil strife does seem far-fetched, if not outright naïve.

And yet, even a cursory survey of the dozens of states that have experienced major internal conflict since 1950 shows that there is remarkable variation in the fates of these states following the war. While some became “trapped” in a cycle of war and state weakness, others settled into relatively stable authoritarianism and still others went on to enter the ranks of electoral democracy just shortly after belligerents laid down their arms. Authoritarianism has prevailed in states such as Rwanda, Tajikistan, and Chad after their civil wars ended, but Uganda, Nepal, Mozambique, and Guatemala each took notable steps toward democratization in the immediate wake of civil war. And where it occurred, post–civil war democratization appeared to take even long-time observers by surprise. “Democratization [in the 1980s] was unexpected because so many of us took civil war to mean that peaceful solutions to conflicts had failed,” writes Latin Americanist Fabrice Lehoucq of the region. “No one in or outside the region predicted democracy would emerge once political violence became widespread” (2012: 67). Why, then, do some states take a surprising turn toward democracy after civil war while others do not?