H-Diplo | RJISSF Roundtable 16-12 on Daly, Violent Victors67 min read

H-Diplo | Robert Jervis International Security Studies Forum

Roundtable Review 16-12 

Sarah Zukerman Daly. Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections. Princeton University Press, 2022.

8 November 2024 | PDF: https://issforum.org/to/jrt16-12 | Website: rjissf.org | Twitter: @HDiplo

Editor: Diane Labrosse
Commissioning Editor: Dipali Mukhopadhyay
Production Editor: Christopher Ball
Pre-Production Copy Editor: Katie A. Ryan

Introduction by Tanisha M. Fazal, University of Minnesota. 2

Review by Reyko Huang, Texas A&M University. 6

Review by Jason Lyall, Dartmouth College. 10

Review by Jessica A. Stanton, Temple University. 16

Response by Sarah Z. Daly, Columbia University. 23

In Violent Victors, Sarah Zukerman Daly poses a question crucial to understanding what happens as countries emerge from civil war: Why does the winning side, whose hands are often stained with the blood of wartime atrocities, so often win the first postwar election? Daly’s answer is at once surprising and intuitive: beleaguered citizens, having endured years of war, value order over justice. And it is the winners of the war—through propaganda, through developing reputations for competence and, most important, through the example of having defeated their opponents on the battlefield—who are the most persuasive providers of security. From the Nicaraguan Sandinistas to the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG) government, violent victors win not only the war, but also the peace. As Jason Lyall puts it in his contribution, Daly shows how “violent victors have several structural advantages in formative postwar elections.”

Three distinguished scholars of political violence review Violent Victors in this forum. All note that one of the hallmarks of Daly’s work is its methodological thoroughness. Every argument and counterargument is considered carefully. Daly approaches her topic from numerous angles and levels of analysis, from survey experiments in Colombia that show voters’ pro-security bias and past belligerents’ strategies to exploit this bias to detailed text analysis of party documents in El Salvador and Nicaragua that show how postwar warring parties sought to leverage their war experiences in the peace. While much of the research underpinning the book dives deeply into specific cases, one chapter draws upon cross-national data to demonstrate the widespread nature of security preferences and voting. As Reyko Huang notes, “Daly has produced an exemplary work of social science scholarship.” Jessica Stanton agrees: “Daly’s book offers a model for how to bring multiple strands of evidence to bear in analyzing a complex phenomenon.” Lyall calls the book “a monumental achievement.”

The best scholarship invites reflection and critique as well as inspiring interlocutors to push the author to extend the analysis in new directions. Violent Victors is no exception. The reviews in this forum center four key questions around sequencing, the role of international actors, war narratives, and the book’s normative and policy takeaways.

Both Stanton and Lyall, for example, put Daly’s work in conversation with scholarship that focuses on earlier stages of conflict termination. As part of an effort to wrestle with Daly’s question, Stanton asks whether violent victors would have participated in the peace process. Lyall suggests that the line drawn in the book between wartime and peacetime may be “too sharp.” Understanding the temporal dynamics of the transition—and the implications of those dynamics—for future elections is, they suggest, a key piece of the puzzle Daly sets out to solve.

Part of the solution to this puzzle may well refer to the role of actors outside the state. Stanton wonders how international actors who care about violations of humanitarian law during the conflict reconcile their own preferences vis-à-vis violent victors with the likelihood of these same parties winning office. As she points out, it would also be useful to have a sense of the relationship between restraint and war outcomes; perhaps the most abusive rebels are generally less likely to win, in which case the phenomenon Daly documents is less frequent—or, at least, more lopsided—than we might otherwise suppose. Huang also pushes Daly on the issue of foreign intervention, asking whether and to what extent external support for one party or the other during a war affects political support for that party post-war. Lyall picks up on a similar point, arguing that the “violent victors” dynamic suggests an increased role for external intervenors who would prefer that the most violent of groups not become the victors. This general line of questioning intersects with key recent scholarship, such as Aila Matanock’s argument that rebel group participation in the negotiation of peace agreements is crucial to their success, and that it is most likely to occur under the auspices of international intervention of some kind.[1]

Civilians are key to Daly’s argument, and the reviewers praise Violent Victors for the agency it ascribes to civilians; Huang in particular registers a “deep appreciation for the way Daly is careful to defer to, and amplify, citizens’ priorities throughout the discussion.” They are the voters who elect the violent victors, with an aim to safeguarding their own security. As both Huang and Lyall point out, though, it is not just civilians but also the perspectives and narratives they hew to that anchor the argument. In a callback to the sometimes slippery distinction between terrorists and freedom fighters, Huang argues that violence is to some extent in the eye of the beholder. “Depicting belligerent parties as ‘tormentors’ makes their electoral success all the more surprising, but may or may not capture the way citizens view the party in question,” she writes. Building on this point, Lyall identifies a potential contradiction in the sources of civilian attitudes: while Daly paints voters as rational and informed, both Huang and Lyall see points in the book where citizens are easily swayed by narratives that are manufactured by political groups. Such narratives, Lyall argues, may be especially important in some of the stalemated cases that Daly discusses. Drawing on scholarship from Laia Balcells, Abbey Steele, and Lyall himself, Stanton points out that citizens’ views of fighting parties may be stickier than Daly proposes.[2]

Violent Victors both opens crucial new research avenues, but also speaks directly to existing scholarship—and policy making—on how the political, economic, and social fabric of postwar nations may be reconstructed. Daly’s argument presents a direct challenge to those, for example, who view the first postwar election as the opportunity to institute transitional justice, implement robust social service provision, and rectify gender imbalances. Given the prevailing sentiments that favor security, argues Daly, and the tendency of winning parties to leverage those sentiments into a successful electoral campaign, such interventions are unlikely to work. But violent victors do not last forever. While they tend to win the first—and even the second or third—election, they must either reorient their programmatic stances as the war recedes, or risk losing power. Thus, Daly counsels patience. In the realm of transitional justice, for example, she points out that “the international justice community has tended to disengage just at the moment when it might have the most impact: in the medium term, when changes in citizens’ preferences render an expansion of accountability more feasible” (261). The postwar transition, in other words, is much more attenuated than the peacebuilding community might prefer.

Nonetheless, the key takeaways from the book are normatively troubling, and in ways that push back against decades of work on human rights, post-conflict justice, and peacebuilding by activists and scholars alike.[3] As Stanton writes: “The wealth of evidence Daly presents that voters in post-conflict elections often support the very same groups responsible for wartime atrocities is disheartening.” Huang chimes in, noting that Daly’s policy implications are focused on the aim to “engage with citizens’ desires for stability and safety and [that Daly] has no illusions that outside efforts to advance causes such as justice will find fertile ground in the immediate postwar period.” Lyall adds that Daly’s policy recommendations, “which are rooted firmly in the idea that military victory is decisive for founding elections, will come as cold comfort to activists who are seeing to promote postwar democracy and justice.”

In her response to these reviews, Daly picks up on exactly this convergence. She is eager to find a way forward that could soften the effects—and implications—she identifies. Therefore, she is receptive to suggestions as to the role that third-party actors could play in assisting more restrained parties in war and addressing media bias, for example. But she also responds with references that reinforce her own general theoretical argument and empirical findings. Thus, for Daly, and for scholars to follow, Violent Victors identifies a troubling phenomenon that both inspires attention and requires sustained policy engagement.

Contributors:

Sarah Z. Daly is Associate Professor of Political Science at Columbia University. Daly is the author of Organized Violence After Civil War: The Geography of Recruitment in Latin America (Cambridge University Press, 2016) and Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections (Princeton University Press, 2022). Her work received the American Political Science Association 2024 Gregory Luebbert Best Book in Comparative Politics Prize and APSA 2023 Leon Epstein Outstanding Book Award, and was shortlisted for the 2023 Luebbert Prize and the 2017 Conflict Research Society Book of the Year Prize. Daly was named a 2018 Andrew Carnegie Fellow and Minerva-USIP, Peace and Security Early Career Scholar.

Tanisha M. Fazal is Arleen C. Carlson Professor of Political Science and Waldfogel Scholar of the College of the Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of two award-winning books: State Death: The Politics and Geography of Conquest, Occupation, and Annexation (Princeton University Press, 2007) and Wars of Law: Unintended Consequences in the Regulation of Armed Conflict (Cornell University Press, 2018). Her most recent book is Military Medicine and the Hidden Costs of War (Oxford University Press, 2024).

Reyko Huang is Associate Professor at the Bush School of Government & Public Service at Texas A&M University. Her research examines rebel diplomacy, governance, and transnationalism in the context of armed conflict and international politics. She is the author of The Wartime Origins of Democratization: Civil War, Rebel Governance and Political Regimes (Cambridge University Press, 2016).

Jason Lyall is the James Wright Chair of Transnational Studies and Associate Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He is the author of Divided Armies: Inequality and Battlefield Performance in Modern War (Princeton University Press, 2020), which received the 2022 APSA Conflict Processes Section Best Book Award, the 2021 Peter Katzenstein Book Prize, the 2020 Edgar Furniss Book Award, and the 2020 Joseph Lepgold Prize. He is currently writing a book on the lessons learned from the American War in Afghanistan.

Jessica Stanton is an Associate Professor in the Political Science Department at Temple University.

In Violent Victors, Sarah Daly presents a gripping puzzle: Why, having just survived a civil war, would people vote for the very parties that are responsible for the horrors of the war? The war is over, people are daring to hope for a better future, and they have the opportunity to participate in the realization of a new chapter in their country’s trajectory—and yet, rather than castigate those who ordered mass violence, time and again people choose to elect them into office. As Daly writes, violent electoral victors have appeared “in every corner of the world, in every period of history, after every type of armed conflict, and in every form of regime” (253). This is not about the fog of war; voters are knowing and strategic and they care about their future. This is about people intentionally choosing “bloodstained” parties to be their new governors.

In examining this puzzle Daly has produced an exemplary work of social-science scholarship. Her theory is at once parsimonious and revelatory, offering a core takeaway message while holding enough explanatory power to account for a number of second-order puzzles. The empirical analysis is expansive in scope and masterfully executed. When I closed the book, the lingering image was not one of belligerent parties celebrating electoral feats, but of a dark shadow of war and trauma cast over a society, stirring enough fear and anxiety about the future that citizens, queuing before a ballot box in anticipation of a new beginning, end up voting for the very parties that wrought their wartime hardships.

Daly argues that belligerent parties that prevail militarily in the war will strategically brand themselves as mighty victors who managed to successfully end the war and are thus best poised to keep further instability at bay. Citizens, who are concerned foremost with order and security in the war’s aftermath, in turn vote on the promise of a more peaceful future, paving the way for belligerent parties to ascend to seats of power in the postwar government. This is a story of politics all the way down: political parties born of war are highly strategic in elections and craft their campaign narratives with targeted messages for specific types of constituents, while voters weigh their priorities in the war’s wake and elect into office those leaders whom they believe will best ensure security and safety. As always, the politics comes with heavy costs: by prioritizing security and voting for war-tainted parties, citizens ineluctably sacrifice justice, liberalism, and welfare—just when these goals, mere ideals during the war, might appear newly attainable.

In developing this theory Daly interweaves multiple strands of literature that are rarely in dialogue with each other, including scholarship on public opinion in IR, electoral politics, American political behavior, war termination, and postwar political development.[4] This is hard to do well, and is done seamlessly in this book. Though the link is not explicitly drawn, the theory’s political core, framed as it is in Madisonian terms, also directly speaks to a classic conundrum of state-building on how to strike a balance between government effectiveness and restraint.[5] The book shows how this central dilemma dogs government formation in the critical moment of post-conflict national elections, just as it has historically in other contexts of modern state development.

The theory’s explanatory potential is on full display when Daly derives a number of intermediary hypotheses that together comprise the length of the causal chain. The theory can explain how parties arrive at their ideological positions and programmatic choices, how they reckon with their violent pasts, which voters they seek to mobilize, how they select their party leadership, and what campaign messages they disseminate. At times Daly embeds arresting details amidst an otherwise technical discussion, reminding readers of the stakes. Defining “voters” and describing the pervasive fear endured even by those who only indirectly experienced the conflict, she writes, based on her fieldwork in Colombia, that “they traveled with their phones predialed to their loved ones in case of a kidnapping” (16).

Each hypothesis in the fairly long causal process, from war outcomes to parties’ postwar electoral strategies to voter behavior to electoral outcomes to broader outcomes in governance, justice, and democracy, is assiduously tested in successive empirical chapters. If mixed-methods research designs are something of a norm of late in IR and conflict studies monographs, Daly raises the bar with an impressively diverse array of data sources and empirical techniques. The book combines years of multi-site fieldwork propelled by deep expertise in a region with survey experiments, archival research, analysis of Twitter data, comparative case studies, and cross-national analysis using original data, and at various levels of analysis as befits the specific hypothesis being tested. Empirical rigor demands a transparent discussion of the limitations of the research design and data; the book also delivers here, adding important nuances and ultimately making for a robust and highly compelling set of findings.

Violent Victors generates a number of important implications for scholarship and policy. Daly is clear-eyed that the implications point toward difficult tradeoffs: between people’s desire for security after conflict and the imperatives of justice, rights, and social well-being; between what citizens prioritize and what we, as a broad scholarly audience, might wish to see in a country emerging from violence, including accountability for wartime abuses; and between the situation on the ground and what interveners, with varying agendas, might attempt. I deeply appreciate the way Daly is careful to defer to, and amplify, citizens’ priorities throughout this discussion, thereby also staying true to the book’s own empirical findings—in essence, she suggests policies that engage with citizens’ desires for stability and safety and has no illusions that outside efforts to advance causes such as justice will find fertile ground in the immediate postwar period. This again may not be an easy message from a normative standpoint, but one that is in keeping with the logical implications of her research.

There are a number of ways future research can build on the foundations of Daly’s work, and she identifies many of them in the book. Here, I offer three additional ideas. First, Violent Victors shows that once belligerents have laid down their arms and transitioned from the battlefield to the electoral arena, propaganda becomes their weapon of choice. Daly provides fascinating details of the war of narratives and blame between the party of Álvaro Uribe and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC) in post-civil war Colombia. Each party engaged in a strategic retelling of the violent past, casting its own violence as heroic or necessary to combat the terrors sown by the adversary while blaming that adversary for all the woes of the war (94-98). Battles in the informational space are an inherent and even healthy feature of any electoral campaign in democracies, but Daly demonstrates that they can take a particularly pernicious form in the postwar context, with disheartening consequences for democracy itself. Given an emerging body of scholarship on the role of information, misinformation, and disinformation in politics, whether in civil wars, in populist regimes, in political lobbying or in international relations,[6] these insights are ripe for further empirical investigation. Daly writes of a “daily barrage of images, tweets, and news of the coming anarchy” countenanced by Colombian citizens during an electoral campaign, pointing to the power of strategic (mis)information in shaping public opinion in the volatile postwar context. The dominance of social media and new information technologies and the sheer cacophony of organized and unorganized voices in democratic processes suggest that concerns about information manipulation, strategic obscurantism, and fake news have only become deeper and graver since scholars such as Jack Snyder demonstrated the consequential role of elite narratives in transitional contexts.[7] Daly’s work thus both inspires new research on information and the media and empirically demonstrates their effects in the context of post-civil war elections.

Second, I was struck by the framing and language used throughout the book to refer to belligerents-turned-candidates as “bloodstained parties” and “tormentors” (e.g. 12, 50, 326). In one sense, this is simply factual description: the subjects of Violent Victors directly participated in the war’s violence and even the atrocities and are in various ways responsible for the war. The framing reveals the underlying vantage point of peace, which many of us share, whether implicitly or explicitly, in our scholarship. Yet, from the vantage point of civilian populations that have lived through the war, these actors’ most salient identities may not always or even primarily be tied to their violence. Depending on the context, for different individuals belligerent parties could be anything from tormentors or terrorists to liberators and heroes, or all of these at once. Depicting belligerent parties as “tormentors” makes their electoral success all the more surprising, but may or may not capture the way citizens view the party in question. Other sections of the book, such as when belligerent parties are described as “unrestrained and without regard for the law,” likewise betray a particular understanding of belligerent parties that may not be universally applicable (34). Indeed, recent scholarship explores precisely this variation—why some belligerent groups go out of their way to respect the laws of war while others show utter disregard for it.[8] From the vantage point of analysis, then, the point here is not to question how much blood parties have on them, but to ask whether descriptors used in the book capture the political situation as experienced by those with agency in the story being presented. We do not need an assessment of who is a terrorist as opposed to a freedom fighter, but it raises the question: in a given context, what are the dominant identities or characteristics that voters ascribe to the belligerent parties? We are likely to find variation here.

Finally, Daly’s research lays a theoretical basis for more explicitly accounting for international interventions in the analysis. The case studies in Violent Victors, whether they involve the wars of Colombia, Nicaragua, or El Salvador, prominently feature external interventions that were aimed at supporting one side or another during the war. More generally, contemporary regional and international geopolitics is such that most civil wars today are fought with foreign intervention. This raises a number of questions for future scholars: if belligerents win the war with extensive foreign backing, do voters still credit the winning party for bringing the war to an end? Do they still bestow it with the same level of confidence in its ability to ensure postwar security? Might we expect belligerent parties to invest even more heavily in information manipulation in order to gain credit for winning the war if they had received significant foreign support? Given the clarity of its theoretical model, Violent Victors enables future researchers to examine these questions in light of the book’s formidable analytical basis.

A monumental achievement, Sarah Zukerman Daly’s Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections meshes theoretical rigor with methodological pluralism to investigate the puzzle of why rational voters support the very same parties that were responsible for mass atrocities during recent civil wars.[9] They do so with surprising regularity. Indeed, these “bloodstained parties,” which are often responsible for the bulk of the wartime harm inflicted on civilians, have nonetheless garnered widespread support in founding elections from Colombia to Bangladesh without resorting to electoral dirty tricks or outright coercion. Postwar voters, Daly argues, are clear-eyed pragmatists driven above all by security considerations, not more aspirational aims of justice and morality. In the eyes of forward-looking security voters, bloody victors, despite (or because of) their wartime conduct, reap the credit for ending the war while emerging with reputations for competence in security affairs. Violent victors are, in other words, both firefighter and (future) arsonist, able to attract security voters by their wartime credentials and by signaling restraint from future victimization if they are elected. To test this claim, Daly marshals an extraordinary range of evidence, including intensive fieldwork in Central America, party-level archival evidence from three post-civil war elections, a survey experiment in Colombia, and a new cross-national dataset of postwar electoral outcomes for 205 belligerent parties in 57 countries since 1970. The result is a wealth of new theoretical and empirical insights that deserves a wide audience among scholars of comparative politics, especially those who study political violence and its legacies.

The book’s central argument can be summarized quickly. Violent victors have several structural advantages in formative postwar elections. Vanquishing wartime enemies, for example, establishes a reputation for competence in the security arena that helps win over swing voters. These parties also receive the lion’s share of credit for ending the war and its attendant civilian victimization. By contrast, belligerents who lose can neither credibly claim to have ended the war nor threaten its resumption, removing a further source of electoral leverage over anxious security voters. Violent victors can thus adopt a “Restrained Leviathan” electoral strategy: claim credit for ending the war, purge (some) of the more zealous human rights abusers from its ranks, and promise an iron hand toward criminals in the emerging postwar order. Non-belligerent parties, which have fewer options, are forced to rely on non-security issues like economic reform that resonate less with nervous, and still traumatized, voters. Parties that lose the war are in an especially tight bind: they must jettison their military commanders, run a slate of civilian-only candidates, express remorse for wartime abuses, and adopt an ideological plank that highlights differences from the party that won the war if they have any hope of electoral success. War outcomes, in short, dictate electoral strategies which in turn determine the relative vote share among (non-) belligerent parties, at least during these formative postwar elections.

Embedded within this violent-victors framework is a baseline view of individual voters as rational, forward-looking, and predominantly concerned with postwar security. Crucially, most, if not all, voters are assumed to be willing to trade liberty and prosperity for credible assurances of postwar stability, even at the hands of the worst human rights abusers. As long as violent victors play the right “Restrained Leviathan” electoral cards, prospective voters will overlook any measure of wartime excesses. In fact, in perhaps the book’s most dispiriting empirical finding, there appears to be little connection between the severity of wartime abuses and the electoral vote share of its perpetrators.[10] Nor are prospective voters deluded by false or incomplete information (the “fog of war”) about the true extent of civilian casualties or relative responsibility for them (27-38). Here, uncertainty shrouds the transition from war to peace, not the crimes committed during wartime, and so strategic voters act rationally to choose the same bloodstained parties that offer the best hopes of securing a stable, if unjust, peace.

Daly has assembled a truly kaleidoscopic set of methods to test the proposed violent-victor theory. She employs a series of survey experiments among 1,510 victims and non-victims in Colombia to test the theory’s individual-level logic, including voter sensitivity to different candidates, party messaging, and blame attribution for wartime atrocities. Three case studies from Central America draw on archival materials and interviews to examine how party leaders crafted their postwar messages in situations marked by government victory (Guatemala), rebel victory (Nicaragua), and military stalemate (El Salvador). Daly also uses the new Civil War Successor Party (CWSP) dataset to test the relationship between war outcomes and vote share in founding elections globally for 1970–2015. Subnational data on wartime victimization and postwar rebel (and government) success in select countries further extends the analysis. Finally, in a hidden gem of a study, a discussion of the electoral fortunes of some 784 paramilitary-allied mayors in Colombia during closely contested elections helps unpack how victorious candidates are associated with reduced crime but also lower provision of public goods like education (246-48).

Sweeping in scope, Violent Politics invites further debate and discussion. In that spirit, I offer four bundles of comments here, each of which highlights a different aspect of the book’s theory, findings, and empirical strategy.

First, Daly’s elegant, if not sparse, violent-victor theory struggles with the complexities and nuances of party-voter dynamics that are on display in the book’s empirical chapters. To be sure, all theories simplify by necessity. Here, however, it quickly becomes apparent that there are two models of party-voter dynamics at work, not just one, and that these two frameworks have very different microfoundations. Evidence from Nicaragua, Guatemala, and (especially) El Salvador suggests that voters are not (just) forward-looking agents who take their cues from the war’s outcomes. Instead, we see how violent victors must devote substantial resources to (re)shaping postwar narratives to shift blame for wartime abuses and to win over swing voters. These chapters devote considerable attention to how parties craft winning platforms for postwar voters, a task that seems redundant if war outcomes drive electoral preferences. Alianza Republicana Nacionalista (ARENA) in El Salvador is perhaps the extreme case. Its war with the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) ending in stalemate, ARENA doubled down on its security credentials, seeking to claim credit for ending a war in which it was responsible for 95 percent of civilian casualties (144-45). It was successful; voters were persuaded that, despite the military draw, ARENA deserved most of the credit for ceasing the war, and that it was more respectful of human rights than the FMLN.

El Salvador highlights two important theoretical wrinkles. First, contrary to the theory’s expectations, the war’s outcome played almost no role in shaping electoral preferences. Instead, outside factors, including ARENA’s access to the media and financial resources, helped it persuade swing voters (142-43). Second, and related, voters in these three cases appear easily swayed by party narratives of blame attribution that run counter to widely known truths about the war. Gone are the theory’s rational, calculating, even cynical voters casting their vote for bloodstained parties in the hopes of securing stability. In their place, we encounter naive voters who are susceptible to misinformation, easily swayed by outright lies, and have voting preferences that are shaped by the hot politics of blame attribution rather than the cold reality of war outcomes.

Indeed, perhaps the most interesting set of findings centers around just how many voters carry mistaken beliefs into the voting booth. Survey evidence from Colombia in 2020, for example, finds that a quarter of all respondents believed that the war was one-sided terrorism conducted by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), not an actual two-sided civil war. Despite reams of public evidence, 35 percent maintained that the military did not commit a single extrajudicial execution—the so-called “false positives” (64)—during the entire war. Twice as many respondents believed that army excesses were justified compared to similar rebel atrocities. About 26 percent supported full amnesty for the (victorious) government party; only 13 percent did so for FARC, despite far greater state-inflicted violence (89). In short, while it is possible that the respondents were honestly mistaken (or simply lying to the enumerators), it appears that a sizable share of respondents held implausible beliefs that sharply contradicted widely known facts about the war.

This second, more implicit, view of voters as deluded or, at the least, easily swayed, clashes with the book’s explicit assumption that rational voters are not entrapped by ignorance or the fog of war. Daly does, however, nod at this tension in passing: “My argument makes the case,’” she writes, “that people do know the broad brushstrokes of the facts, but that the attribution of blame is messy and does not track objectively with those facts” (107). This is a difficult tightrope to walk: if facts can be so easily distorted or reframed, then the emphasis on objective war outcomes in the violent-victors theory seems misplaced. At the very least, it requires an important set of auxiliary assumptions about how voters make decisions and the types of messaging that they find most persuasive. Even if populations contain both rational and deluded voters, we need an understanding of what makes individuals fall into which camp and how distributions vary across countries. Unanswered questions remain: why are some voters susceptible to false narratives about wartime conduct and credit-claiming for stopping the war? Why are the assurances of “Restrained Leviathans’’ seen as credible if narratives are easily (re-)spun? Why do bloody victors who win decisively, as in Guatemala, still invest so heavily in shaping postwar narratives (178-80)? How elastic are postwar narratives and why do they decay over time? What, in the end, makes for a persuasive postwar narrative, and do these features generalize across cases?

These dueling narratives about individual decision-making collide when we consider victims of civil war violence. These individuals are the sharpest illustration of the book’s core puzzle; their electoral support for their own tormenters is (or should be) most surprising (64). Yet we never truly meet the victims. In nearly every empirical test, victims and non-victims are pooled together, rendering it impossible to see how past trauma has affected electoral preferences. In the lone exception (table 4.3), we find a large difference between victims and non-victims in their views on whether Colombia’s army was justified in killing civilians and the severity of punishment that should be levied against those responsible (75). We are left with only tantalizing clues about how exposure to violence affects issue valence and voting; whether trauma tips individuals into certain modes of decision-making where past atrocities are more (or less) salient; or whether the effects of harm are conditional on the perpetrator’s own identity.[11] Even the brief discussion of voters in the theory chapter (45-46) is mostly silent on how violence might affect the attractiveness of party platforms or views on the tradeoffs between security and liberty.

Disentangling these two theoretical models of voter decision-making is ultimately an empirical proposition. It is important to note, then, that the majority (56 percent) of wars in the Civil War Successor Party (CWSP) dataset used in Violent Victors ended in stalemate. By contrast, decisive government and rebel victories are rare, accounting for only 12 and 10 percent of total observations (217), respectively. As a result, the pathway from war outcomes to voting as captured by the book’s favored “security voter” model is blocked for most wars. Stalemates, however, create political room for the competitive spinning of narratives to persuade fence-sitting voters and to shift blame onto (former) enemies. The danger here is that much of the work being done in these cases to explain party-voter dynamics hinges on factors that are left outside the book’s sparse model of voters. A more nuanced and, yes, less parsimonious, model, one that centered the politics of blame attribution and the variable effects of violence and trauma, might have captured more of the dynamics revealed in the book’s own evidence.

Second, sometimes mixed-method research can be a two-edged sword. While Violent Victors is a model for assembling evidence on multiple levels, the findings generated by individual, party, and (sub)national data don’t always agree, raising questions about how to weave these disparate findings into a single tapestry. Take, for example, the claim that voters reward the wars’ victors at the ballot box. Cross-national evidence from the CWSP confirms this association (220-21). Microlevel evidence from survey respondents in Colombia, however, suggests that war outcomes do not increase perceptions of greater competence for security (figure 4.4, 83). Nor does military victory increase the likelihood that voters assign credit to the winning party (figure 4.6, 86). Government contrition, rather than blaming the rebels for wartime atrocities, is actually the preferred electoral platform among these respondents (p.76). Yet we discover in the qualitative case studies, particularly in El Salvador, that blaming rebels is clearly a winning electoral strategy (143-44). Subnational data on wartime victimization and postwar vote share from 14 civil wars offers a similarly mixed picture. In the bulk of cases (n=10), voters appear indifferent to the magnitude of the government’s victimization in their area. In three cases, however, postwar government party vote share actually decreases, contrary to the theory’s expectations (227). How we should reconcile these subnational (non-)findings with survey data from Colombia, where victims were more likely to view government violence as justified (74), is unclear.

Third, the book draws a sharp—perhaps too sharp—line between wartime and peacetime. To take one example, both state and rebel governance projects in wartime leave a residue that shapes how civilians interact with both parties once the shooting stops.[12] Parties, in other words, don’t begin their postwar electoral competition with a blank slate; violence is only one form of prior interaction with future voters. More subtly, the finding that wartime atrocities do not harm postwar electoral chances (as long as the belligerent doesn’t lose the war) raises key questions. Does indiscriminate violence actually pay if it helps lock in electoral victory by creating a credible threat of future violence and establishing a perception of security competence? What types of indiscriminate violence are most effective at creating this reputation? Do atrocities occur more frequently once victory seems assured? How does the expectation of victory shape a belligerent’s strategy toward civilians? A fascinating extension would be to examine wartime deliberations within government and rebel policy-making circles to see whether perceived postwar electoral fortunes influenced their conduct toward future voters.

Finally, in a surprisingly brief coda, Daly offers policy implications for the global human rights community (258-61). External actors, she argues, should not upset the postwar balance of power, for fear of reigniting civil war. Instead, the outside world should “detect and communicate the new military distribution of power to the decisive audience of voters’” to help ensure that they elect the stabilizing power (260). Non-belligerent parties should be encouraged, but only modestly, with efforts confined to helping them capture credit for non-security issues like economic reform. Civil society, too, should be supported over the long haul, but postwar transitional justice, if it comes, will arrive slowly. These recommendations, which are rooted firmly in the idea that military victory is decisive for founding elections, will come as cold comfort to activists who are seeking to promote postwar democracy and justice.[13]

But are Western governments and activists truly sidelined? The book’s findings also suggest a more radical, less status quo-oriented, set of actions. If war outcomes are indeed decisive for postwar elections, then external intervention during wartime might be one pathway by which Western governments can tip the balance toward more democratic belligerents, thus preventing the lock-in of an unjust peace. Similarly, if voters are misled by ginned up narratives, then Western non-governmental organizations and activists could harness social media and other outlets to combat this misinformation. Such actions might level the postwar playing field, preventing parties with egregious human rights records from winning elections and consolidating power. Future research could consider the effectiveness of media interventions by outside powers in reshaping views of belligerent parties, for example. Similarly, the book’s framework could be extended to consider the effects of third-party violence on postwar voter attitudes and beliefs.

Taken together, Violent Victors’ combination of theoretical ambition and methodological sophistication provides new insights and generates puzzles in the study of wartime violence and postwar electoral outcomes. It is sure to be at the center of ensuring debates in comparative politics about the nature, quality, and durability of peace as societies emerge from the ravages of civil war.

Since 1970, more than one-third of countries worldwide have experienced a civil war.[14] In the majority of these conflicts, at least one armed group perpetrated atrocities against civilian populations—bombing or shelling civilian residential areas, massacring civilians, burning civilian homes and crops. What happens when war ends in these countries? Does this legacy of violence—in particular, violence directed against civilians—impact political contestation in the aftermath of war? In her book, Violent Victors: Why Bloodstained Parties Win Postwar Elections, Sarah Zukerman Daly takes on these pressing questions to shed light on the political dynamics of countries emerging from civil war. In doing so, she reveals a disconcerting and surprising pattern of post-conflict politics: belligerents who are responsible for wartime violence against civilians often win in post-war elections and in many cases, even secure support from communities they victimized during the war.

Daly’s book takes this disturbing finding as its starting point, and as its motivating puzzle, asking when and why groups that are responsible for wartime violence often perform well in post-war elections. When and why do voters sometimes support such groups? In answer to these questions, Daly argues that in the immediate aftermath of civil war, security is often the primary concern for voters; above all else, they seek an end to the violence and upheaval of war. In this context, voters choose the party that seems most likely to maintain peace, basing this judgement on the military outcome of the war. The winners in war—even when they have committed wartime atrocities against civilians—are better able to position themselves as the party that is most likely to ensure security and prevent a return to war. In framing the country’s recent history, these “violent victors” downplay wartime atrocities and instead emphasize their role in bringing about an end to conflict (5).

Daly marshals an extraordinarily rich body of evidence to substantiate these theoretical claims, drawing on survey experiments in Colombia that analyze how individuals respond to different ways of framing past violence; qualitative case studies that trace the political strategies of parties competing in post-war elections in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua; cross-national statistical analyses of the post-war electoral performance of more than 200 former belligerent groups; and sub-national data on variation in electoral support for former belligerents. Indeed, Daly’s book offers a model for how to bring multiple strands of evidence to bear in analyzing a complex phenomenon; this multi-method approach allows Daly to assess the implications of her theoretical argument at different levels of analysis and to trace the behavior of key actors: political parties competing in post-war elections as well as voters.

Theoretically, the book makes a number of contributions to the scholarship on civil war, political violence, and post-conflict peacebuilding.[15] First, Daly’s book sheds light on the consequences of wartime violence, demonstrating the ways in which the experience of war shapes post-war political contestation and outcomes. Civil war scholarship is somewhat segmented, with separate bodies of work examining the dynamics of wartime violence and the nature of conflict termination.[16] And yet, Violent Victors urges a more integrated understanding of these phases, demonstrating that the trajectory of a war influences how actors compete for power in post-war elections, and how voters respond.

Second, Daly’s book sheds new light on a long-running debate over how to balance the goals of upholding justice for wartime atrocities while also securing peace.[17] The literature on post-conflict justice has long debated the merits of holding individuals and groups accountable for wartime atrocities, with some arguing that holding individuals responsible for atrocities is essential for rebuilding societies torn apart by war[18] and others warning that prioritizing criminal accountability can stand in the way of securing peace.[19] However, missing from this debate is a careful assessment of how citizens weigh these alternatives, and how belligerents themselves navigate the competing demands for justice and peace. Daly’s book offers such an analysis, revealing a complex set of political dynamics in which belligerents deliberately construct political platforms that frame past violence in a more favorable light and voters weigh this past violence against the prospects for future peace.

Third, Daly’s book is part of a growing body of work that analyzes civil wars using a framework that gives greater agency to civilians themselves.[20] This scholarship highlights that even in extremely violent contexts, civilians make meaningful and consequential choices about how to protect themselves and their communities from violence. Indeed, Daly urges us to question our assumptions about what civilians prioritize in the aftermath of war, showing that contrary to common belief, civilians often prioritize security and an end to conflict over justice, at least in the short term. However, Daly also points to the complicated informational context within which civilians make such decisions. Former belligerents often retain control over key sources of information, giving them greater power to frame the conflict’s history and allowing them to downplay or justify their own use of violence, while exaggerating their opponent’s transgressions. As civilians navigate this complex post-conflict environment, Daly finds that they elect parties that they perceive as mostly likely to ensure continued peace.

Violent Victors undoubtedly advances our understanding of political contestation in the aftermath of civil war. And yet, fully appreciating the book’s contributions also requires a more critical assessment of how to understand the book’s findings in relation to existing research on political violence and civil war. Daly argues that belligerents can translate military victory into electoral success by framing themselves as protectors who will bring stability and security to the country. Central to Daly’s argument is the claim that these belligerents succeed in winning support from a wide range of civilians, including the very same civilians that they targeted during the war. And yet, research by scholars like Laia Balcells;[21] Jason Lyall, Graeme Blair, and Kosuke Imai;[22] Kentaro Hirose, Kosuke Imai, and Jason Lyall;[23] and Abbey Steele[24] demonstrates that civilians often possess strong loyalty to one side or the other during war. These wartime loyalties may be linked to ethnicity or ideology,[25] and as Balcells demonstrates, often develop through complex processes of prewar mobilization of political identities.[26] Indeed, this research shows that the strength of civilian loyalties—or mobilized political identities—creates incentives for belligerents to target their opponent’s supporters,[27] and also shapes how civilians assess responsibility for wartime atrocities.[28]

At first, it seems that Daly’s findings are in direct tension with this literature: if civilian loyalties are as strong as the research cited above suggests, former belligerents should be unlikely to win over such a wide range of voters in post-conflict elections. However, greater attention to the differences between the wartime and peacetime contexts may offer a way of reconciling these findings. During war, although civilians can sometimes shape the competition between belligerents at the local level, they rarely have the tools to impact national-level competition between the warring parties. Once the war has ended and the warring parties have agreed to a political settlement that includes holding competitive elections, civilians gain considerable power to determine outcomes at the national level. This shift in the power of civilians to influence national-level outcomes may lead to the prioritization of security that Daly identifies. In this interpretation, perhaps civilians do not discard or betray their wartime loyalty to their favored side. Rather, it may be that civilians, who are cognizant of the high stakes of the first post-war elections and given the power to push the country forward toward peace, are willing to put aside this loyalty temporarily in the interest of consolidating peace. As Daly shows, this only happens when the opposing side has won militarily.

Violent Victors also urges a more nuanced assessment of the ways in which international norms shape civil war outcomes. In research examining the causes and consequences of wartime violence against civilians, I, and other scholars like Tanisha Fazal and Hyeran Jo, have found that armed groups can often gain diplomatic and political advantages by complying with international humanitarian norms.[29] And yet, Daly’s findings reveal that respect for international law—in particular, exercising restraint toward civilians—does not always translate into electoral success; even the most violent belligerents can succeed in post-war elections if they win the war, and thus convince voters of their ability to secure the peace.

Reconciling these two sets of findings is also challenging, but additional discussion of the timeline of war termination may offer a way forward. My own research shows, for example, that rebel groups that exercise restraint toward civilians—when facing an opponent that commits atrocities—are more likely to win international diplomatic support, which gives these restrained rebel groups leverage to secure political gains during peace negotiations.[30] However, this finding focuses on the initial political settlement that ends the war, without extending the timeline to consider how former belligerents fare politically in subsequent years. Daly’s book moves our focus further along the post-war timeline, showing that these restrained rebel groups do not always succeed in elections—in particular, if voters perceive these groups to have lost the war militarily.

Exploring the timeline or trajectory from war to peace may also be a fruitful avenue for future research that extends and builds on Daly’s findings. For example, Violent Victors highlights the importance of civilian perceptions regarding the military outcome of the conflict. Through careful tracing of the electoral strategies of parties in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua, the book shows that parties work to shape civilian perceptions, constructing interpretations of the conflict that paint their group in a favorable light. This raises the question of whether and how peace processes affect civilian perceptions of wartime victory. If one of the warring factions wins significant political concessions during negotiations to end the war, does this initial political settlement influence perceptions of victory? And if so, what does this mean for Daly’s argument about the importance of perceptions of military victory to voters’ decisions in post-conflict elections? In the El Salvador, Guatemala, and Nicaragua cases explored in the book, did the terms of the settlements or the character of the peace negotiations influence perceptions of the belligerents, or affect the frames available to former belligerents during their electoral campaigns?

Bringing an analysis of the peace process into the conversation might also shed greater light on the role that international actors play in this process. International actors—foreign governments and intergovernmental organizations—are often intimately involved in negotiating settlements to end civil wars. These actors mediate between the warring parties, propose terms of settlement, provide aid to support post-war reconstruction, and often serve as guarantors for peace agreements.[31] What role, then, might international actors play in shaping civilian perceptions of former belligerents? More broadly, how do international actors impact the nature and outcome of political contestation during post-conflict elections? Daly notes that international actors are often involved as observers who monitor post-conflict elections, and her case study of Nicaragua points to the impact that US intervention in Nicaragua had on post-conflict politics. But are there other ways in which international actors influence post-war politics? For example, do international actors seek to bolster nonbelligerent parties who demand justice for wartime atrocities, or otherwise intervene to shape political outcomes?

Violent Victors also raises questions regarding domestic and international responses to wartime atrocities and the role of international humanitarian norms. Again, these questions offer potential directions for future research. Although research shows that Western international actors are more likely to extend diplomatic support to armed groups that exercise restraint toward civilians, Daly’s work demonstrates that at least in the context of post-war elections, domestic constituencies—voters—often overlook belligerents’ behavior during wartime and instead vote for the party most likely to bring peace. How and why might domestic and international audiences differ in their responses to wartime atrocities? What does this mean for our understanding of the role that international humanitarian norms play during conflict? Do different constituencies weigh international norms differently, and, if so, what implications does this have for our understanding of civil war dynamics?

Finally, pushing more on this question about how domestic audiences respond to wartime violence, Daly’s book suggests that state actors retain considerable power and legitimacy, even in the aftermath of long-running and violent internal conflicts. For example, Daly shows that in Colombia, many citizens blame the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia, FARC) for violence, even when they themselves or their communities were victimized by the government or pro-government paramilitary groups. Moreover, voters in Guatemala elected a party led by the former military dictator Efraín Ríos Montt, whose government had committed severe atrocities against civilians during the war. Daly documents how the former government constructed a narrative emphasizing its ability to bring stability and security to Guatemala. Similar patterns played out in El Salvador, where the former government—despite its own connections to wartime atrocities—successfully framed the Farabundo Martí National Liberation Front’s (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional, FMLN) wartime attacks on infrastructure as terrorist violence, even though civilian casualties resulting from this violence were limited. Daly’s findings suggest that when assessing group responsibility for violence—in the context of post-war elections—voters assess responsibility for the war as a whole rather than responsibility for violent acts committed in the context of the war. In this context, domestic audiences assign a considerable degree of fault or blame to insurgents, judging that it was insurgents’ decision to pursue rebellion that resulted in both insurgent and government violence.

Violent Victors thus presents compelling evidence that governments retain an advantage in terms of their perceived legitimacy and authority, suggesting that it should be difficult for insurgent groups to overcome this hurdle to win post-war electoral support. Would a rebel group be capable of reconstructing the narrative of war to justify past atrocities in the same way that government actors have been able to do in Colombia, El Salvador, and Guatemala? Daly’s case study of Nicaragua offers an example of a victorious rebel group that fared well in post-conflict elections, substantiating her argument that the military outcome of the conflict shapes voter choices in the aftermath of war. However, this is a case in which the rebel group did not engage in severe wartime violence against civilians, leaving open the question of whether a rebel group that is responsible for significant atrocities could similarly recast itself as a provider of security and stability. And could an abusive rebel group claim this security narrative even if the government had not committed similar atrocities—cases in which a sharp disparity marks a clear difference in the behavior of the belligerents?

Perhaps this brings us back to questions about the timeline or trajectory of peace, as well as to questions about the role that international actors play in the peace process. Cases of abusive rebel groups winning out over restrained governments simply may not exist empirically. Such groups often lose militarily on the battlefield as their base of domestic support erodes in the face of persistent atrocities—much like the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda. If such groups make it to the negotiating table, their lack of domestic and international support is likely to limit the political concessions they can extract from the government, making it difficult to portray the conflict’s outcome as a victory, or even a draw. Lacking domestic and international legitimacy, these groups—like the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone—may be unable to remake their image during post-war electoral campaigns. Yet, in many conflicts, the disparity in the behavior of belligerents is not so sharp. And as the evidence that Daly presents in Violent Victors makes clear, this creates opportunities for political parties to compete in framing a favorable narrative of the war.

The wealth of evidence Daly presents that voters in post-conflict elections often support the very same groups responsible for wartime atrocities is disheartening. However, another interpretation is to see these findings as an indication of the extraordinary strength of civilians’ desire for peace. This push for peace above all else may have undesirable consequences in the short term—allowing perpetrators of violence to retain political power—but, as Daly discusses, this same push for peace can also contribute to escalating demands for justice and accountability, offering a more optimistic outlook for the long term.

Response by Sarah Z. Daly, Columbia University

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