Abstract
How do wartime legacies affect repression after the conflict ends? Irregular forces support the government in many civil wars. We argue that if this link continues after the war, respect for human rights declines. As “tried and tested” agents they are less likely to shirk when given the order to repress. Governments might also keep the militias as a “fall-back option”, which results in more repression. Analyzing data from 1981 to 2014 shows that pro-government militias that were inherited from the previous conflict are consistently associated with worse repression, but newly created ones are not. Wartime pro-government militias target a broader spectrum of the population and are linked to worse state violence. New militias usually supplement wartime ones and use violence primarily against political opponents. This study highlights the detrimental impact of war legacies.
Highlights
Countries emerging from civil war are often caught in a conflict trap (e.g. Derouen and Bercovitch, 2008; Hartzell et al, 2001; Walter, 2015)
We zoom in on the role of pro-government militias, which are common in intra-state armed conflicts
Our data have highlighted that, in most cases where a government had used a militia during the civil war, this relationship carried on in the postwar period
Summary
Countries emerging from civil war are often caught in a conflict trap (e.g. Derouen and Bercovitch, 2008; Hartzell et al, 2001; Walter, 2015). Countries emerging from civil war are often caught in a conflict trap Even without a return to full-blown conflict, postwar societies face adverse conditions.. In the aftermath of civil war, countries struggle with economic recovery The legacy of war affects political participation (Bellows and Miguel, 2009; Blattman, 2009) and attitudes (Grosjean, 2014; Grossman et al, 2015; Lupu and Peisakhin, 2017), but we know little about drivers of state-sponsored repression after the conflict ends. Postwar governments often cannot rely on well-functioning institutions to regulate societal or political conflict Keels and Nichols, 2018) Under these difficult conditions governments often resort to violence to maintain control. How can we explain variations in state-sponsored repression in post-conflict societies?
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