Quantitative research on the “durability” of peace following civil wars typically captures the breakdown or survival of “peace” in a binary manner, equating it with the presence or absence of civil war recurrence. In the datasets that underpin such studies, years that do not experience full-scale civil war are implicitly coded as “peaceful.” Yet, post-civil war environments may remain free from war recurrence, while nevertheless experiencing endemic violent crime, state repression, low-intensity political violence, and systematic violence against marginalized groups, all of which are incongruent with the concept of peace. Approaches to assessing post-civil war outcomes which focus exclusively on civil war recurrence risk overestimating the “durability” of peace, implicitly designating as “peaceful” a range of environments which may be anything but. In this article, we discuss the heterogeneity of violent post-civil war outcomes and develop a typology of “varieties of post-civil war violence.” Our typology contributes to the study of post-civil war peace durability, by serving as the basis for an alternative, categorical conceptualization of “peace years” in conflict datasets.

This paper develops a theory which explains how wartime processes and relationships result in positive or negative 'wartime legacies' which can influence the degree of political stability experienced by countries after civil wars that end in rebel victory. Specifically, it predicts that variations in a) the character, scope, and extent of rebelcivilian wartime interaction, and; b) the decisiveness, costs, and payoffs of victory, combine to influence the legitimacy, capacity to govern, and capacity to control that rebels have when they capture power. These legacies in turn shape incentives and opportunities for violent challenge to the new regime in the postwar environment, thereby lowering or raising the prospects for political stability. To illustrate the utility of the theory, it is applied to three cases which experienced differing levels of political stability following rebel victory; Cuba, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.