Politics in the shadow of the gun : political legacies of rebellion and authoritarianism for party politics after Civil War in Burundi and beyond

Since the end of the Cold War, the transformation of rebel groups into political parties has become one way of integrating former armed movements into liberal war-to-peace transitions. In contrast, before the fall of the Iron Curtain, rebel groups were predominately militarily marginalized and politically excluded. From Kosovo to Nepal, and from El Salvador to Burundi, the last two decades have seen a rise in the number of cases, in which the integration of rebel groups into ‘post-conflict’ party politics has been actively promoted by national, regional and international policy-makers. This has led to an emerging scholarship on rebel-to-party transformations. The large majority of existing studies are constructed around strict conceptual distinctions between war and peace, as well as between rebel group and political party. They fail to capture the ambiguities, which often underpin political transition processes. In conflict-affected countries, we often witness the emergence of settings that can be qualified as neither a state of outright war, nor as a clear stage of peace. Instead, we observe politico-military organizations that frequently alternate between social protest, rebellion, violence, and party politics.  In this dissertation, I develop a conceptual and theoretical critique of the existing literature on ‘rebel-to-party transformations’. Primo, I draw on the “no peace, no war” and “armed politics” paradigms to deconstruct and interrogate common categories, such as war and peace, rebel group and political party, violence and democracy, in order to study the ambivalences between these different categories. Drawing on the concept of “hybridity”, I propose to conceptualize rebel groups and their political party successors as “hybrid politico-military movements” in order to study the inter-linkages between politics and violence throughout the historical trajectories of these organizations. I argue that we need to take hybrid political and armed orders seriously if we want to understand party politics in the aftermath of civil war. Secundo, I appeal to historical institutionalism to propose a novel theoretical framework for understanding the trajectories of rebel political parties. Historical institutionalism brings time back into the study of rebel-to-party transformations. It is an excellent analytical approach to remedy predominant, ahistorical accounts. I specifically draw on “systemic historical process analysis” to map out rebel political parties’ ideational, power and institutional politics during and beyond civil war. This dissertation analyzes the ambiguities of ‘rebel-to-party transformation’ processes through an in-depth qualitative case study of Burundi. Drawing on a paired comparison, I analyze the historical trajectories of the PALIPEHUTU-FNL and the CNDD-FDD in Burundi. Long cited as a major “success story” of international liberal peacebuilding among policy-makers, diplomats and academics alike, Burundi has increasingly witnessed a return to authoritarian practices. Burundi watchers have repeatedly warned of the risk of renewed civil war, especially in the aftermath of the 2015 electoral crisis. This makes Burundi an excellent case for the study of “neither-peace-nor-war” and “armed politics” settings, and their implications for rebel-to-party transformation scholarship.

Keyphrases: Burundi, Civil wars, Rebel groups, Political parties, Conflict resolution