Rebel governance and violent politics when rebels win war

In August 2023, the ruling party of Zimbabwe—the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF)—won the national elections once again. This means that this anti-colonial rebel party, which has been in power since winning the country’s first post-independence elections in 1980, will continue to rule until the end of 2028. Zimbabwe’s ruling party is not alone in their dominance: in just the past few years, several victorious rebel governments have once again been re-elected into power, including Uganda’s NRM in 2021, Angola’s MPLA in 2022, and Rwanda’s RPF in 2024. Looking more broadly into Africa’s history, former rebel parties in SSA are more likely to be long-lasting dominant single party regimes, and are more likely to exhibit common competitive authoritarian characteristics (see Fig 1).

Rebel victors’ remarkable longevity begs two questions. Why, despite initial adoption of democratic norms, do so many become competitive authoritarian regimes? And why do they keep getting re-elected despite, in many cases, facing declining support and offering poor services?

Rebel governance and post-war authoritarianism

To understand these two questions, we might investigate rebel victors’ wartime strategies in conjunction with post-war governance. Rebel victors don’t come into power to a blank slate—in fact, they often are already on an uneven playing field immediately: many victorious rebel groups run nascent political parties that have already built pre-existing organizational structures and capacities for governance at the local level. These endowments come from their wartime activities, such as rebel governance. In some civil wars, rebel groups seek to exert social control and bolster organizational capacity. One key strategy to do this is to build rebel-civilian ties with members of the population (e.g. religious leaders, chiefs, youth leaders, and such), creating informal institutions, and deputizing these key civilian supporters for exercising control. This is an exercise in wartime party-building, as rebels are establishing community-level party cells, cultivating supporters, and building grassroots structures to sustain support once elections come into play. However, because these actions are undertaken during war, they are often underpinned by coercive violent practices, which subsequently become reproduced in post war politics.
I highlight two mechanisms through which these violent practices keep rebel victors in power:

1.  Rebel victors are more likely to institutionalize wartime governing strategies and institutions in post-war politics. By relying on wartime structures and practices, they develop an organizational advantage at every level of politics once they come into power. These include an organized grassroots movement for effective control during election season and robust local apparatuses for intimidation (e.g. party cells).
2. Rebel victors also maintain control over the narrative of their victory and subsequent rule, which are reproduced by the victor’s party through education, commemoration of war (e.g. war re-enactments), and violent institutions. This process of socialization normalizes the pervasive use of violence in peacetime politics.

These mechanisms are strongest in areas where the rebel victor sustained the most control during war (their wartime strongholds) because it is precisely in those areas that their wartime institutions and practices are the strongest and the most embedded.

Evidence from post-independence Zimbabwe

I provide mixed-methods evidence from post-independence Zimbabwe, where ZANU-PF has ruled since winning elections in 1980. I draw my qualitative data from three archives in Zimbabwe; I also digitize colonial-era maps, which I combine with seven waves of Afrobarometer survey data for quantitative analysis. I show the following:

• During war: Rebels engaged civilians in various organized ways, including for reconnaissance, for gathering supplies, and for planning major politicization rallies within rural Zimbabwe. These jointly helped the rebellion to exert control—through both politicization and coercion—in parts of the country during war.
• After war: Wartime practices and actors (civilians, ex-combatants, politicians) helped to reproduce ZANU-PF’s wartime governing strategies after war. They kept people in check and under ZANU-PF control during periods of physical and electoral insecurity.
• Long run politics: ZANU-PF continues to enjoy electoral dominance in its wartime strongholds—but not due to continued entrenched support. These areas are more likely to participate in formal politics and less likely to protest; but, they overwhelmingly report a lack of political freedoms and reduced beliefs about votes truly reflecting the public’s will.

In sum, civilians living in ZANU-PF strongholds may be voting for the ruling party in large part due to organized coercion. These findings dovetail with existing reports and accounts of the ruling party’s coercive clientelism during election years: for example, ACLED reports of overt violence during Zimbabwe’s election years show greater violence in ZANU-PF wartime strongholds—where vote share is the highest—than in opposition areas (Fig 2).