Patterns of Post-Conflict Governance: Towards a Typology of Post-Conflict Polities

Abstract

For the past two decades, the standard recipe to promote long-term peace in war-torn coun-tries was to create western-type state-structures. The success-rate of this model has been modest at best. Rather than new western-type states, we have witnessed the emergence of hybrid regimes in which external actors often remain engaged in the long-run. This disserta-tion makes the case to treat these new forms of hybrid regimes not as incomplete statebuild-ing processes, but rather as specific types of political regimes (post-conflict polities). Based on a qualitative review of 19 post-conflict countries, it differentiates between six types of post-conflict polities ( Let s Share polities, Doomed to Share polities, Let the Winner Take it All polities, The Winner Took it All polities, You Stay Out polities and Benevolent Intru-sion polities). In ten empirical case-studies, the different polity-types are characterized in detail.