When militant organizations lose militarily but win politically

Abstract

The literature on political violence emphasizes two main ways that militant organizations ‘win’: eliminating the adversary outright or coercing the adversary into making concessions. While most do not win in this way, some organizations that fail to win go on to achieve their goals in post-conflict political competition. What explains variation in the post-conflict political success of militant organizations that did not achieve their organizational goals on the battlefield? In this study, we run the first large- n empirical analysis of the phenomenon. Our empirical results show that organizational size and wartime lethal capacity positively predict the political success of militant organizations that did not win on the battlefield. Other plausibly related features of militant organizations, such as their united wartime front or coherent ideology, do not predict eventual political success. Additionally, we investigate the case of Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional in El Salvador and present marginal effects analyses—further illustrating the effects of a legacy of violence and organizational size on post-conflict political success.