Coercive Legacies: From Rebel Governance to Authoritarian Control
In a Journal of Politics article, Shelley Liu explores the role of coercion in rebel governance.
Ex-rebels govern almost a quarter of sub-Saharan Africa today. How does war affect these countries’ long-run political development, and what explains their rebel regimes’ longevity?
In the Journal of Politics article “Coercive Legacies: From Rebel Governance to Authoritarian Control,” Shelley Liu explores the role of coercion in rebel governance. The assistant professor's research helps to explain (1) the continued use of organized coercion in postwar politics when faced with challenges to ruling party dominance and (2) where such coercion is most effectively employed.
“I examine Zimbabwe where the anticolonial rebel party has remained in power since 1980,” Liu writes in the abstract. “I rely on archival data to qualitatively trace mechanisms, map prewar to current-day administrative divisions, and code a measure of wartime governance. I combine these data with Afrobarometer surveys to demonstrate long-run subnational variation in coercive political control. Findings deepen our understanding of war’s effects on peacetime politics and provide one explanation for infrequent political turnovers despite regular elections in many postconflict states.”
Established in 1939 and published for the Southern Political Science Association, The Journal of Politics is a leading general-interest journal of political science and the oldest regional political science journal in the United States.