Civil wars as critical junctures: Conceptual grounding and empirical potential

Abstract

Civil wars are not only destructive: they can also generate new, long-lasting social, political, and economic structures and processes. To account for this productive potential and analyse post-conflict outcomes, I argue that we should analyse civil wars as critical junctures. Civil wars can relax structural constraints, opening opportunities for wartime processes to generate changes or to reinforce, rather than transform, the status quo. Changes or stasis may then be locked in by conflict outcomes, creating path dependencies. Studying civil wars as critical junctures allows for a clearer understanding of what variables mattered and interacted at different points in the conflict process, and the varying roles of structure and agency in producing institutional change or reinforcing pre-existing conditions. I explore the potential benefits of a critical juncture approach in the civil wars literature on different aspects of post-conflict politics and illustrate them in analysing the literature on women’s empowerment during and after civil wars. Applying the critical junctures framework to civil wars’ effects on institutions and socio-behavioural patterns can provide analytical clarity about complex processes and contexts, can facilitate comparison across cases and studies, and draws critical attention both to what civil wars change and to potential pathways not taken.

Introduction

Civil war ‘has gradually become the most widespread, the most destructive, and now the most characteristic form of organised human violence’.¹ Despite the destruction inherent in civil wars, they may be productive and generative, leading to the creation of new orders and institutions.² Civil wars, however, may also durably reinforce the status quo in cases of successful counter-insurgency and incumbent victory, representing temporary breaches in pre-existing structures and hierarchies – breaches that failed to widen to create enduring change.³ In this sense, I argue, civil wars are critical junctures: moments of possibility in which the long-term institutional trajectory of a state and society can be rapidly shifted, depending on how the conflict unfolds and is resolved and how it shapes actors’ post-conflict behaviour. If civil wars unravel a country’s pre-war socio-political fabric, that fabric can be restored, adapted, or pulled apart completely and replaced.

Lower-level conflicts with at least 25 battle deaths per year are the most prevalent form of organised civil conflict,⁴ and many rebellions never advance beyond a few initial anti-state attacks.⁵ Such small conflicts may create societal changes on a localised scale. My focus, however, is on the potential for civil conflict to create institutional changes to the state and nation or across a large region. I therefore follow Sambanis’s definition of civil war as entailing competition between the state and an effective, organised armed resistance group in a sustained violent conflict that causes at least 500 deaths over the course of its first year.⁶ Different violence and battle death thresholds may conceptually and empirically affect the analysis of civil wars and their consequences,⁷ but this definition means a civil war lasts long enough and involves significant enough violent contestation of state power⁸ that wartime social processes and orders and their post-war effects can potentially diverge from the status quo ante.⁹

I first examine the analytical utility of critical juncture analysis and its applicability to the study of civil wars and their consequences. I then discuss how existing literatures touch on aspects of civil wars as critical junctures without explicitly embracing the critical juncture framework. To explore in greater detail how the critical juncture framework can be applied, I focus on the example of civil wars’ effect on women’s role in politics and society, comparing two major books and discussing how they do and do not align with the critical juncture framework, and what a more complete engagement with the framework would offer. In the conclusion, I discuss how the field may benefit from further research applying critical juncture analysis to the study of civil wars and post-conflict political, social, and economic relations and outcomes.

Critical junctures as concept and analytical tool

Critical junctures were fully conceptually developed by Collier and Collier,¹⁰ building on Lipset and Rokkan.¹¹ Scholars have since conceptually refined critical junctures and developed methodological principles to study them.¹² Collier and Collier define a critical juncture as ‘as a period of significant change, which typically occurs in distinct ways in different countries (or in other units of analysis) and which is hypothesized to produce distinct legacies’¹³ – though the framework can also be fruitfully applied to single case studies, with scholars focusing on cases in which a marked divergence from past patterns is noted.¹⁴ Critical juncture analyses often focus on change, with Slater and Simmons arguing that critical junctures are ‘periods in history when the presence or absence of a specified causal force pushes multiple cases onto divergent long-term pathways, or pushes a single case onto a new political trajectory that diverges significantly from the old’.¹⁵

Another school of thought, however, argues that change and divergent outcomes are less important than the contingency and opportunities for agency that emerge when a critical juncture opens.¹⁶ Soifer’s specification of critical junctures’ causal logic focuses on the presence or absence of permissive and productive conditions.¹⁷ Permissive conditions loosen structural constraints, enabling possible change, while productive conditions are those that, when permissive conditions are present, ‘produce the outcome or range of outcomes that are then reproduced after the permissive conditions disappear and the juncture comes to a close’.¹⁸ Capoccia and Kelemen likewise emphasise that critical junctures are ‘relatively short periods of time during which there is a substantially heightened probability that agents’ choices will affect the outcome of interest’.¹⁹

Soifer deems it a ‘crisis without change or missed opportunity’ when permissive conditions are present but major, divergent change does not occur.²⁰ I follow Capoccia and Kelemen, however, in still viewing as critical junctures cases where permissive conditions were present and change was possible but did not occur.²¹ Rapid, major change is possible, but the contingency of a critical juncture means it may also revert to and reinforce the status quo ante: ‘Hence, change is not a necessary element of a critical juncture.’²² Even analyses focused on divergence should still consider counterfactuals or negative cases where change did not occur under similar conditions. Whether focused on change or the potential for it, critical junctures analyses examine the interaction of both exogenous and endogenous factors and processes and analyse both pre-existing and new structures and how actors interact with them.²³

As Figure 1 shows, critical junctures have six elements identified by Collier and Collier and Soifer.²⁴ Antecedent conditions are the pre-existing state of affairs and the basis against which change must be assessed, with special attention to ‘critical antecedents’ that may exert causal influence independently of or in interaction with productive conditions during the critical juncture.²⁵ A cleavage or crisis developing from the antecedent conditions provides the permissive conditions to open the critical juncture and create possibilities for change. Mechanisms of production are the factors that shape the critical juncture and the change that might occur. The outcome of the critical juncture is the end-point at which the permissive conditions that opened the critical juncture are no longer present and a new status quo solidifies, reducing contingency. Mechanisms of reproduction are processes reinforcing and perpetuating the critical juncture’s legacy after the juncture is closed, helping lock in the outcome path and creating path dependency.²⁶ Finally, the trajectory of the legacy is the stability over time of the critical juncture’s key outcome(s), continuing until the legacy ends and the critical juncture’s outcome ceases to outweigh more proximate causes related to dependent variables of interest.

Figure 1. Elements in a critical juncture sequence.

Other theoretical and methodological approaches have been used to study the causes and outcomes of institutional change or the historical legacies of major societal events. In recent decades, there has been an increase in studies of the historical legacies of major events and persistent effects. This is often within quantitative research frameworks focused on statistical causal inference, variously discussed as quantitative history,²⁷ historical persistence research,²⁸ or historical political economy.²⁹ Such research tends to focus heavily on longer-term effects and a particular hypothesised mechanism producing them, which can be quite valuable. A full critical junctures approach, however, gives greater, more equal attention to multiple points in a historical process, examining what created possibilities for change in the first place and mechanisms producing change or stasis—not only mechanisms of persistence and isolating causal effects³⁰—and can be pursued either qualitatively or quantitatively.

The critical juncture framework has been applied to explain the outcomes of a range of potentially transformative processes and events, including state formation, interstate power relations, regime change and type, political parties’ and party systems’ formation, economic development, and cultural change.³¹ Civil wars are therefore far from unique in being critical junctures, though I argue that they fit the framework well, and that by directly challenging both the existing state’s legitimacy and monopoly on violence, they may be particularly well suited to generating the potential for durable changes to institutions and behaviour.³²

Civil wars within a critical juncture framework

How do civil wars fit as critical junctures within the current literature’s definitions and applications? The idea of critical junctures as crises or ‘unsettled times’³³ easily fits civil wars. Revisiting Collier and Collier’s definition of a critical juncture as ‘a period of significant change, which typically occurs in distinct ways in different countries (or in other units of analysis) and which is hypothesized to produce distinct legacies’,³⁴ civil wars clearly match these criteria, so long as we specify them as periods of significant potential change. As Skocpol highlights, even in civil wars resulting in social revolutions, many institutions may remain unchanged.³⁵ Civil wars do represent a significant change from ‘peacetime’ life and vary widely across and within countries in the salient cleavages and motivations between belligerent groups and governments, levels of violence, technologies and organisation of fighting forces, conflict outcomes, and other factors.³⁶ They can affect demography, economic capacity and structures, domestic and international political institutions and relations, political behaviour, cultural norms, and other political, social, and economic factors.

Civil wars are often branded as complex in the issues, actors, and behaviours involved in them,³⁷ and, in line with conceptualisations of critical junctures, civil wars are characterised by contingency and potentially heightened agency: single battles or strategic choices may mark clear turning points in the trajectory of the conflict and the country at large, and the qualities of individual or collective leaders loom large in decision-making, organisation, and the fate of belligerent groups.³⁸ The rationalist literature on civil wars highlights that, while constrained by structural factors, information asymmetries, and uncertainty, leaders’ decisions still play a central role in determining moments of war onset, change, and resolution.³⁹ Within civil wars, leaders have choices of ideologies and methods for mobilisation and political planning, choices over strategy and tactics, decisions about what goals to pursue, and movements’ fortunes may rise or fall based on leaders’ choices or exogenous events.⁴⁰ Exogenous shocks like natural disasters can interact with processes and institutions endogenous to civil wars, reshaping outcomes in ways that would not have occurred if a civil war were not ongoing.⁴¹ Civil wars and their processes also produce distinct social and institutional legacies across and between conflict-affected countries or regions and units that were not affected by conflict or in which wartime processes took a different form.⁴² While Wood highlights how civil wars transform social networks,⁴³ they can also affect formal and informal political and economic institutions and relations during and after the conflict, which may themselves reshape social networks.

The potential for civil wars to reinforce preexisting institutions or produce changes in them does not depend on the outcome of the war. Incumbent victory can foreclose change, but incumbents can also make lasting reforms in response to conflicts. Rebel victory can result in statebuilding and societal transformation but does not always produce it. Stalemates and negotiated settlements can institutionalise new domestic power balances or simply incorporate new elites into the existing system.

Civil wars may thus be critical junctures for countries or regions in the macro sense of opening possibilities for change, but at the more concrete level, only in some particularly intense civil wars are all aspects of society contested or affected. Most civil wars will constitute critical junctures for only some institutions or socio-behavioural patterns; which ones are subject to potential change is in part a product of the specific issues rebels seek to change and the populations each belligerent mobilises for their cause, but unintended changes may also take place. As discussed below, even when women’s empowerment has not been a specific war aim of rebels or the government in a civil war, it has resulted through several mechanisms.⁴⁴ This means that in applying a critical juncture framework researchers must be clear about which aspects of politics and society they believe were or might have been changed by civil war processes.

Application of the critical juncture framework

Not all civil wars research is concerned with institutional processes and outcomes, but studies seeking to understand how civil wars affect social, political, or economic institutions and broad socio-behavioural patterns can productively apply a critical juncture framework by accounting for each of element of a critical juncture, from antecedents to end to legacies. Figure 2 shows how different aspects of civil wars (within the arrows) may match up to the elements of critical junctures (the labels above). One must also choose dependent variables of interest that may be produced by a specific wartime process to trace that process’s potential impact and how it might create path dependencies shaping post-conflict political, social, or economic life.

Figure 2. Elements of civil wars in a critical juncture sequence.

Some research on a state and society’s general pre-war background is always necessary, but the dependent variable(s) of interest will determine what antecedents are relevant to closely examine and trace through the critical juncture. The escalation from a pre-conflict status quo to violent contestation of state power marks a permissive condition that can also open the possibility for major, rapid, and durable change,⁴⁵ especially if rebels are seeking institutional change and not only a change of political leadership. One overarching productive condition for change is sufficient rebel power to potentially (a) carve out significant areas of influence in which to exercise rebel governance;⁴⁶ (b) force the state into significant policy changes or concessions; or (c) topple the existing government and then pursue desired institutional changes. If rebels are weak from the beginning and never able to call the incumbent’s control and legitimacy into question, there is little potential for any change, leaving antecedent conditions largely untroubled and failing to open a critical juncture.

The specific objects of institutional contestation or possible reform depend on rebel and incumbent goals and strength, with researchers then focusing on a particular outcome or outcomes of interest. The outcome of the critical juncture is the set of institutions that are produced or reinforced by wartime processes, while the critical juncture ends not necessarily with the termination of the civil war, but when the political power balance is consolidated sufficiently that institutions stabilise. The mechanisms of reproduction are those institutions or institutional changes that emerged or were reified during wartime and persist after the conflict has ended, continuing to shape further policy and practice. These institutions or changes generate continued downstream consequences until another crisis or civil war creates a critical juncture that once again opens the possibility for rapid and major institutional change, disrupting the first critical juncture’s legacy.

Different types of civil war resolutions might reinforce and reproduce wartime processes or solidify new institutions, thereby inducing variation in downstream structural, policy, and behavioural effects. Institutions the government or rebels reinforce, build, or change may have lasting effects regardless of the ultimate war outcome, however. Incumbents defeat many rebel movements early on or reach peace agreements in which rebel leaders are co-opted, but incumbents’ mobilisation efforts or the integration of former rebels into the state and society can still have lasting effects.⁴⁷ Rebel governance, meanwhile, may have lasting political and institutional effects on civilian life in regions of rebel influence, even if rebels are ultimately defeated.⁴⁸

A definitive end to a civil war also is not necessary for the critical juncture to have closed, since the structural contingency and opportunities presented by conflict may close and stabilise while conflict persists at a low intensity or without any formal resolution.⁴⁹ Southern Sudan, for instance, experienced durable institutional changes due to its civil war against the government in Khartoum, which in the 1990s and early 2000s had settled into a stalemate and de facto southern independence before formal independence in 2011,⁵⁰ a situation that has applied in other de facto states.⁵¹ The hurting stalemate that developed in eastern Ukraine’s civil war after 2014 led to major institutional changes in the Ukrainian military and increased the proportion of the population with combat experience and strongly nationalist sentiments, offering major advantages when Russia launched a full-scale invasion in 2022.⁵²

It should, therefore, be possible to undertake a critical juncture analysis tracing institutions through a civil war no matter the war’s resolution. Doing so can make clearer how civil wars affected different aspects of politics and society; which variables or mechanisms shaped these effects; and the timing, tempo, and duration⁵³ of these effects or interactions. And since civil war processes do not always unfold in a linear manner, applying the critical juncture framework helps specify when, exactly, institutional contestation or change was solidified and how it was reproduced over time.

Civil wars research, critical junctures, and post-war developments

The existing mainstream literature on civil wars – and security studies more broadly⁵⁴ – has tended not to apply the critical juncture framework,⁵⁵ despite many studies across issue areas alluding to institutional and social disruptions and change. Discrete moments may be discussed as critical junctures within a civil war, and rebel leaders themselves may use the term to refer to a particular battle or shift in operations. For example, Darfurian leader and Sudan Liberation Army adviser Sharif Harir described the opening of new operations in North Darfur to Roessler as ‘a “critical juncture” as “there was no government of Sudan presence” in the region’. While this may have been a turning point in the conflict, it was not a critical juncture in the scholarly sense, but rather a strategic change without clear institutional consequences.

More accurately in academic terms, Ugandan scholar Joe Oloka-Onyango saw the country’s civil war and National Resistance Army rebel victory as a critical juncture for national political development, stating:

It is highly unlikely that the Ugandan people will ever again have the opportunity to revisit the historical experience of tragedy and crisis that we have lived through, and to attempt to make amends and reconstruct the constitutional framework of governance that we live under. In short, should the current exercise prove a failure, it is doubtful that another opportunity shall present itself with such varied meeting of the necessary social, political and economic factors to allow for as serious a consideration of the varied issues involved.⁵⁶

I now survey existing literatures and how analyses of civil wars and their consequences align with the definition of critical junctures but usually do not apply a critical juncture framework, noting ways in which a critical juncture analysis might enrich existing works.

Civil wars and regime durability

Scholars of regime durability have recently focused on how wartime institutions and experiences may contribute to stronger, more cohesive single-party or competitive authoritarian regimes following rebel victory in a civil war.⁵⁷ Sustained and successful ideologically motivated violent struggle destroys alternative power centres in society, creates in-group cohesion within the rebel organisation-turned-ruling-party, generates strong ties between leaders and the security forces, and leaves powerful security apparatuses.⁵⁸ While not explicitly discussed as critical junctures, it is clear in these accounts that civil wars and the need to organise for violent struggle entail both the destruction of old socio-political institutions and the construction of new ones, potentially creating long-lasting legacies locked in and reproduced after rebel victory. Civil conflict, however, may also result in regime durability if incumbents win, since Slater argues that moments of crisis and threats of subaltern insurgency may forge new and durable counter-revolutionary alliances and institutions among the state and societal elites, creating new types of durable authoritarian regimes.⁵⁹ A critical juncture framework could help clarify which conditions are more likely to produce regime durability when rebels win versus those that apply when incumbents win.

García-Ponce and Wantchekon, meanwhile, explicitly argue that African political independence was a critical juncture in which the independence movement’s form shaped long-term regime trajectories: countries with urban anti-colonial protest movements more likely to be democratic and countries with rural insurgencies more likely to become autocratic.⁶⁰ Their focus, however, is on quantitative causal identification rather than on elements of the hypothesised process and mechanisms, which could be foregrounded by applying the critical juncture framework and would help show how the process unfolded in specific cases.

Civil wars, statebuilding, and governance

Similarly, scholars of statebuilding have considered the potential role of civil wars in shaping longer-term statebuilding trajectories, though only sometimes adopting a critical junctures approach. Despite the large literature on the role of interstate war in state formation or long-term statebuilding, consideration of civil wars’ effects has been more limited in this ‘bellicist’ literature, with mixed results.⁶¹

Modern statebuilding and institutional change have tended to follow a ‘punctuated equilibrium’ model of long periods of stasis and critical moments of rapid evolution,⁶² yet Slater and Vu are rare in discussing statebuilding as a product of critical junctures.⁶³ Both argue that the post-1945 moment of rapid state formation, as Japanese and European colonialism were retreating from East and Southeast Asia, was a critical juncture. For Slater, the varying intensity of contention and threats from the masses led to divergent authoritarian statebuilding patterns in Southeast Asia, while for Vu, variation in intra-elite and elite–mass relations led Asian states down divergent developmental paths depending on accommodation or confrontation between these collective elite and mass actors.⁶⁴ Both authors focus on civil war or the threat of it as a potential occurrence within a broader regional critical juncture, but not on civil war itself as a critical juncture. This is despite the crucial role of civil war and insurgent threats in shaping subsequent domestic political and economic trajectories in their accounts. Threats led to the formation of strong counter-revolutionary alliances that built state power in some countries through and after incumbent victories and successful suppression of subaltern movements,⁶⁵ while rebel victories from below also stimulated statebuilding by installing governments focused on transforming their countries in line with left-wing ideologies.⁶⁶

Using a historical political economy approach (without discussing critical junctures), Paglayan similarly finds that civil wars can result in statebuilding by leading elites to expand education systems to build obedience, producing lasting changes in primary school enrolment; Paglayan principally examines cases of incumbent victory, though includes a few cases of rebel victory, too.⁶⁷ As Paglayan acknowledges,⁶⁸ the focus on causal identification in her cross-national statistical analysis does little to illuminate mechanisms; but while her brief case study of educational expansion after civil war in Chile provides an excellent discussion of antecedent conditions related to education and examines subnational variation and alternative explanations, it offers less evidence on the process of elite preference change and how those beliefs were reinforced over time, which a critical junctures approach would bring to the fore.

Dorman more specifically examines the role of rebellion in shaping statebuilding trajectories, implicitly treating civil wars as critical junctures and the ideas, institutions, and experiences of rebel organisations during war as generating particular statebuilding strategies.⁶⁹ Her study has been followed by more recent scholarship combining the rebel governance, regime type, and statebuilding literatures to build a research agenda on rebel victory and its impacts. Most studies have thus far not adopted a critical junctures approach, even though they highlight divergences in security force organisation, governance, and repression of different regions and populations, comparing subnationally and across countries experiencing rebel victory.⁷⁰ Liu in particular highlights how rebels’ wartime distribution of supporters and enemies shaped rebel governance institutions and post-victory patterns of repression and redistribution,⁷¹ though a critical junctures approach could clarify the sequencing of elements in the causal processes she is examining, more easily facilitating application or testing by other scholars.

Thaler explicitly describes civil wars as critical junctures, comparing three victorious rebel organisations that emerged in similar structural circumstances in Liberia, Nicaragua, and Uganda,⁷² but he fails to analyse each element of the critical junctures, which I denote in brackets below. Thaler argues that the breakdown of pre-existing state institutions [antecedent conditions] during the civil war [crisis] created the scope in each case for wide-ranging institutional change if leaders and movements were ideologically inclined to pursue it but that where leaders lacked the ideational drive to exercise agency and try to implement it [productive conditions], there was less divergence from the status quo. He argues that rebel leaders’ varying ideals and goals led them to create different internal institutions and relations with civilians during their rebellions; these generated self-reinforcing patterns [mechanisms of production], crystallising and carrying over after victorious rebels controlled the state [outcome] into statebuilding and service provision efforts [mechanisms of reproduction], resulting in either limited statebuilding and private accumulation of public resources or efforts to build infrastructural power and deliver public services, with varying durability over time [trajectory of legacy]. In Nicaragua, one interviewee highlighted how rebel victory opened ‘the opportunity to construct a diversity and quantity of social organizations greater than the country had ever had’, alongside new state institutions and development projects spread throughout the national territory.⁷³ By contrast, in Liberia, there were high hopes that rebel leader Charles Taylor and his forces would fulfil promises of development once in power, with an ex-rebel commander saying ‘We were expecting that to happen, to build roads and schools and things, but it didn’t happen that way. Charles Taylor only focused on war … his only plan was to rule the country as president.’⁷⁴ A more structured critical juncture analysis could potentially demonstrate more clearly and convincingly how, exactly, rebel ideology and leaders’ agency interacted with antecedent conditions or mattered more than them in each case, and it could make it more feasible for other scholars to test or apply Thaler’s theory in other settings and with different methods.

Rebel-to-party transitions

Though long a subject of scholarly interest,⁷⁵ rebel-to-party transitions have increasingly been analysed with sophisticated data gathering and new theories.⁷⁶ These works look at rebels’ transitions into political parties when they win civil wars, but also how rebels adapt to electoral politics during and after negotiated settlements.⁷⁷ Zaks links decisions about wartime rebel organisational structure to post-conflict party building patterns,⁷⁸ while Sindre finds that wartime institutions continue exerting influence within parties well after the transformation.⁷⁹

Zeng examines party origins more generally, but does analyse party development, institutional strength, and public goods provision when in government in a critical juncture framework, with special attention to civil wars: he argues that successfully revolting against the state requires building mass linkages and institutional strength, with a wider support base incentivising public goods provision and institutional strength facilitating it.⁸⁰ Zeng admittedly focuses more on mechanisms of reproduction and legacies than other elements of the critical juncture when parties are forming, mobilising, and challenging the incumbent;⁸¹ this study, though, offers a platform for future work examining rebel-to-party transitions or effects to fully apply a critical juncture framework to capture all stages of the process.

Post-war security institutions

Post-war security institutions can also be considered in a critical juncture framework, examining how wartime processes led to their evolution or stasis, and how this affects security forces’ interactions with the population. Scholars have analysed military transformation following rebel victory,⁸² but other war outcomes may also lead to changes with roots in civil war dynamics. Government counter-insurgency policies and practices can have long-lasting legacies in cases of incumbent victory or negotiated settlements. In two cases of negotiated settlements in Central America, wartime security structures developed by the government persisted after the wars ended and incumbents left power. Nicaragua’s policing institutions and military built by the Sandinista government during the 1980s Contra War remained intact and generally maintained popular trust into the 2010s.⁸³ Meanwhile, counter-insurgent militias organised by the Guatemalan military persisted informally in the post-war period, engaging in patrols and undertaking extralegal vigilante violence.⁸⁴ Regardless of war outcome, state security forces may also continue targeting repression based on civil war period identities, rather than actual post-war behaviour.⁸⁵ Critical juncture analysis can help trace a wartime security practice or policy through the post-war period to examine outcomes in security force structures and behaviour or societal relations and crime or contentious politics, clearly specifying how the explanatory variable of interest developed, institutionalised, and was reproduced.

Local and behavioural effects

The research areas discussed above generally focus on national-level actors and institutions, but civil wars can also generate significant disruptions and potential for change at the local and individual levels. One possibility for analysis is tracing the long-term impacts of local-level political institutions that may persist or be adapted after civil war. In Uganda, for instance the National Resistance Army (NRA) developed Resistance Councils (RCs) in rebel-controlled areas as local representative institutions; the NRA formalised RCs’ role in governance after victory spreading them nationwide and maintaining these institutions up to the present.⁸⁶ RCs were not originally envisioned by the NRA as their political model, but after forming them during the war to gather support and organise the population, the NRA began holding elections to gain greater local legitimacy and, seeing these elections’ popularity, reoriented their political planning around elected RCs as the manifestation of the NRA’s commitment to democracy.⁸⁷

Wartime processes can also durably shift identities and patterns of political and social participation in society.⁸⁸ Many studies have identified pro-social effects of exposure to civil war in a variety of settings,⁸⁹ but these participatory effects and attitudes towards the state and other groups may be mediated by social network ties⁹⁰ or by whether individuals lived primarily under state or rebel influence.⁹¹ Delving into the process of how civil wars generate attitudinal and behavioural changes is therefore important for exploring how experiences and social ties interact during and after the critical juncture of civil war to shift and then reinforce participatory patterns, as Shenk has done in tracing wartime experiences’ impact on participatory institutions in Colombia.⁹²

Gender relations and women’s political and social status can also be altered, for better or worse, by civil wars, and I discuss in the next section how a critical juncture framework might be applied to studying this topic.

Civil wars and the reshaping of gender relations

Civil wars have rarely, if ever, begun specifically over grievances about women’s rights and political participation, so we might not expect them to open opportunities for lasting, significant shifts in women’s roles or standing in society; yet wartime processes and post-war outcomes have in fact done so in many cases.⁹³ Some civil wars result in high rates of sexual violence and other negative consequences for women,⁹⁴ generating lasting cycles of gender-based violence and rights deprivation. Civil wars, though, can also lead to women’s participation in armed groups as combatants and in non-combat roles,⁹⁵ and greater participation in the workforce or civil society roles, in some cases durably increasing women’s legal rights and participation in decision-making and politics at all levels.⁹⁶ What explains when and how a civil war results in one outcome or another?

As Berry writes, women ‘experience war, bear witness to its effects, and exert agency’, with civil war constituting ‘a period of rapid social change that reconfigures gendered power relations by precipitating interrelated demographic, economic, and cultural shifts’.⁹⁷ Women who fight and mobilise to aid combatants can carve out larger roles after civil wars, but this is not guaranteed. In El Salvador and Nicaragua, for instance, there were gaps between rhetoric and action and between policy changes and implementation in practice in armed groups and after wars.⁹⁸ And depending on the war outcome, changes in gender relations and power may not be solidified. In Kenya’s anti-colonial Mau Mau rebellion, women took on new social roles and were instrumental in sustaining the movement, forcing colonial authorities to increase their attention to women’s needs as a counter-insurgency measure.⁹⁹ The Mau Mau rebellion was ultimately defeated, though, and when Kenya gained independence through negotiations in 1963, gendered inequalities were maintained in rights, representation, and, critically, landholding.¹⁰⁰

After several civil wars, however, women’s political representation has greatly increased, with women participating at higher rates in legislatures and other elected and appointed offices than before the war and compared to other states, especially since the 1980s.¹⁰¹ Gender quotas, women’s empowerment initiatives, and higher numbers of women candidates, however, do not necessarily translate into greater societal acceptance of women’s empowerment, nor women winning office or being able to meaningfully wield political power.¹⁰²

To illustrate the potential benefits of a critical junctures approach, I analyse two influential books about civil wars’ impact on women’s political participation and power: Aili Mari Tripp’s Women and Power in Postconflict Africa and Marie Berry’s War, Women, and Power.¹⁰³ Both books identify civil wars as creating opportunities for women’s political empowerment, but only Berry takes a historical institutionalist critical junctures approach, although without explicitly identifying each element of the critical juncture. This allows me to compare the benefits and trade-offs of each author’s approach and to discuss how fully applying a critical juncture analysis could offer additional insights, especially through a deeper engagement with historical background and critical antecedents prior to and affecting the outbreak of civil war and then how these mattered or not in shaping the causal process of social and institutional change or stasis.

Tripp examines the effect of the end of major civil wars on women’s rights and political representation in Africa, combining cross-national statistical analyses and process tracing in comparative case studies of Angola, Liberia, and Uganda.¹⁰⁴ Tripp looks at how the end of conflict created political openings for women to influence peace agreements and post-conflict constitutions, and to take on political leadership roles. She argues that disruptions in gender relations ‘unique to countries experiencing conflict’ provide a necessary but insufficient causal effect on post-conflict women’s rights, which can only lead to move positive outcomes for women’s rights and representation in the presence of (a) the opening of political space allowing for increased women’s mobilisation, and (b) changes in international norms and pressures related to gender and women’s rights.¹⁰⁵ She thus recognises that civil wars create possibilities for change but do not always result in it, with her study of Angola examining a negative case where civil war did not result in longer-term increases in women’s representation. The wartime disruptions in gender relations and norms identified by Tripp as critically important were women’s increasing voice in their communities, women taking on new economic roles, and women envisioning new, more politically and economically active public lives.¹⁰⁶ In her case studies, Tripp does give some attention to antecedent conditions in the form of pre-war gender relations and women’s movements, and then examines how war disrupted prior social structures and norms. Her emphasis on the post-conflict period, however, gives greater attention to the mechanisms reproducing gender disruptions and their post-conflict legacies, while the nature and potential limits or inequalities of wartime gender disruptions receive less exploration.

A critical junctures approach would fill in the earlier links in the causal chain, complementing Tripp’s excellent analysis of the post-conflict period with more focus on how and where within countries conflict most disrupted pre-existing gender relations and structures – especially in the case of Uganda, where fighting and rebel military activity was more geographically limited – and how these disruptions were maintained or diffused during conflict. Such an approach would give greater attention to how Tripp’s key causal mechanisms developed and how the domestic groundwork was laid for women’s increased prominence and participation in peace negotiations and agreements, and then in post-conflict politics.

Tripp has, in fact, recognised in later work that civil wars constitute critical junctures, looking at civil conflict and popular revolutions as critical junctures for the adoption of constitutional reforms codifying women’s rights.¹⁰⁷ More recently, she has argued that major interstate wars and civil wars constitute critical junctures creating ‘changes in the political elite and ruling class, resulting in the necessity to rewrite constitutions and other rules of the polity’, opening opportunities for women’s suffrage and political representation.¹⁰⁸

While not explicitly naming each element of the critical junctures that civil war opened Rwanda and in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Berry’s book gives clear and equal attention to antecedent conditions and how they came into crisis; how structural changes were produced during war and at its end; and how these shifts were reproduced, institutionalised, and locked into the post-conflict context.¹⁰⁹ This is made clear by her chapter titles moving through each respective case: ‘Historical Roots of Mass Violence’ (chapters 2 and 5), ‘War and Structural Shifts’ (chapters 3 and 6), and ‘Women’s Political Mobilization’ (chapters 4 and 7). Berry examines how civil war and mass violence unsettled the pre-existing order and led to demographic, economic, and cultural shifts in each country, with openings for women’s activism and everyday involvement in politics helping spawn new, politically active women’s organisations and initiatives.

Civil wars can disrupt society and gender relations in multiple ways. Berry highlights how demographic change occurred due to men’s disproportionate death, participation in fighting, and imprisonment, and due to mass displacement more generally disrupting prior social and political geographies; economically, infrastructural and agricultural capacity was destroyed, leading to changes in production and increased reliance on international aid that came with conditions or incentives around women’s rights; and culturally women took on new public roles and were seen as more ‘peaceful’ than bellicose men.¹¹⁰ These shifts permitted greater informal political participation by women, which was reproduced after the end of war, but the additional factor of a new, ‘gender-sensitive political regime’ in Rwanda allowed for gender quotas for public office and increased women’s formal participation and political representation.¹¹¹ Berry’s critical focus on the historical legacies on wartime changes also highlights how women’s new roles in post-conflict society faced challenges due to the unequal nature of political settlements, which ‘created hierarchies of victimhood’, displacement of local knowledge and organisations by international humanitarian actors, and patriarchal backlash against changing gender roles.¹¹²

Examining civil wars as critical junctures is important, Berry argues, because the approach entails analysing ‘other possible outcomes at every stage of the event trajectory, engaging counterfactuals and expecting contingency’, something that is ‘essential, since hindsight often leads to overly deterministic explanations of war’s occurrence and impact’.¹¹³ While agreeing wholeheartedly with Berry, I would also argue that clearly specifying the different elements of such critical junctures helps clarify temporal sequencing and what mechanisms were acting at what points in the process within each case.¹¹⁴ This would more clearly separate Berry’s ‘Historical Roots of Mass Violence’ chapters into the antecedent conditions of politics and women’s status in each country and then what brought on political crisis and war onset. It would also specify in her ‘Women’s Political Mobilization’ chapters when, exactly, the mechanisms of reproduction of women’s empowerment and participation should be considered solidified, and whether formal and informal participation might crystallise at different points; this would then make clearer when the analysis of legacies for each type of participation would begin in Berry’s chapter on the medium- to long-term ‘Limits of Mobilization’ (chapter 8).

As research on gender relations and rights during and after civil wars continues, a critical junctures approach can help to analyse structural shifts and the ways that pre-existing institutions persisted or were strengthened,¹¹⁵ as well as examining how long women’s political empowerment endures after wars and what might change or erode it.¹¹⁶ Research can also further investigate cases where civil wars result in regressions of women’s rights, and how that might vary spatially. The case of Afghanistan, for instance, shows the importance of looking at within-case variation, since the Taliban’s harsh, restrictive gender regime in the 1990s and more recently was reproducing norms from rural Pashtun areas of the country; there was, therefore, little transformation in those rural Pashtun areas, but more extensive regressions of women’s rights and social roles elsewhere in the country, particularly in urban areas.¹¹⁷

When examining civil wars’ gendered effects, researchers must pay close attention to inequalities and take an intersectional approach to ensure that apparently progressive changes on paper or in some women’s rights, political representation, and access to justice are not masking the continuation of exploitative systems and the marginalisation of certain identity groups.¹¹⁸ Work should also continue problematising binary and essentialist conceptions of gender identity and heteronormative views of sexuality, and how they are reproduced or challenged during and after conflict.¹¹⁹ This is especially important because women’s participation in warmaking efforts may be framed in terms of ‘traditional’ gender roles, signalling an incumbent or armed group’s intent for a return to stereotypical socio-political roles and divisions of labour after conflict ends.¹²⁰ A critical juncture framework can help incorporate some of these critiques by specifying as antecedent conditions what prevailing gender and sexual norms and roles were prior to a civil war; how gender and sexual identities were or were not salient during the civil war and ways in which wartime processes reinforced or produced changes in treatment or societal inclusion of women and gender and sexual minorities; which wartime effects were solidified or dissipated as conflict came to an end; and what post–civil war legacies resulted.

Conclusion

I have argued that we can consider civil wars as critical junctures in states’ and societies’ institutional development, moments when contestation of the state’s legitimacy and coercive power lower structural barriers to change and increase actors’ choice sets. Importantly, civil wars may lead to relatively rapid and radical change, or they may instead perpetuate the status quo: a critical juncture is defined by possibility, not only by outcomes of major change.

A critical juncture approach invites researchers to untangle how civil war processes unfold over time and may shift socio-political and economic institutions in both endogenous and path-dependent ways, acknowledging continuities and contingency.¹²¹ It helps focus research on big questions of how civil wars do or do not change major social, political, and economic structures and behavioural patterns, enabling theory building and testing that is also deeply attuned to contextual factors.¹²² Further study of civil wars as critical junctures can provide an improved, more structured understanding of wartime processes, paths taken and opportunities missed, and how institutional change or stasis is produced and reproduced even after civil wars have ended. Given civil wars’ complexity,¹²³ by explicitly examining them and their effects within a critical juncture framework, researchers can improve analytical clarity and rigour, discussing the elements of theories, cases, and data in ways that faithfully capture crucial context and nuance while still enabling cumulative knowledge-building¹²⁴ and the testing of theories and findings across contexts and methods.