Report 71 — After Violence Begins: Factionalization, Transitional Justice, and Why Revolutions Eat Their Coalitions

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Independent research-use declaration

This report studies the political aftermath of violent rupture and how societies prevent recurrence. It contains no operational advice for armed conflict.

Research question

Once political violence has begun, why do broad coalitions fracture, why do emergency institutions become permanent, and how can a successor democracy hold perpetrators accountable without creating a new authoritarian order?

Core finding

The coalition capable of defeating an old order is usually broader than the coalition capable of agreeing on a new one. During opposition, groups can unite around what must end. After rupture, they must decide what begins.

That is when latent conflicts emerge over ideology, property, religion, federalism, policing, justice, economic policy, and the status of former elites.

The greatest danger is the argument that emergency unity requires permanent concentration of power.

1. Negative coalitions are easier than governing coalitions

Anti-regime movements may include liberals, socialists, conservatives, religious groups, secular groups, labor, business, regional movements, security defectors, students, and marginalized communities.

Their shared platform can be one sentence: the old order must go.

After victory that sentence disappears.

The coalition must now answer:

• who writes the constitution;
• who controls coercive institutions;
• what property rules survive;
• whether old parties may reorganize;
• who is disqualified from office;
• whether regions gain autonomy;
• how elections are sequenced;
• whether emergency decrees expire.

These questions create new conflict lines.

2. The emergency-power trap

The victorious coalition often argues that democracy must be postponed because enemies remain dangerous.

This can be factually true: armed spoilers, foreign intervention, sabotage, or organized remnants may exist. But the logic is self-extending. Every opposition group can be redescribed as a remnant. Every election becomes premature. Every criticism becomes destabilization.

The movement builds a new Throne while claiming it is temporary.

A realistic book should show how sincere people participate in this process. Dictatorship is not always created by cartoon villains; it can emerge from repeated emergency decisions that each seem defensible in isolation.

3. Collective punishment is strategically dangerous

Broad punishment based on party membership, profession, ethnicity, region, or institutional affiliation can convert defeated opponents into a permanent counterrevolutionary constituency.

Transitional-justice practice therefore emphasizes individualized evidence, vetting for integrity in sensitive institutions, and broader institutional reform rather than automatic guilt by category.

ICTJ identifies prevention of recurrence as a central goal and notes that vetting, judicial reform, constitutional reform, and civilian oversight can contribute to guarantees of non-recurrence.

4. Justice versus capacity is a real tradeoff

A successor government needs administrators, engineers, judges, doctors, tax officials, utility managers, and other specialists—many of whom served under the previous order.

Total purge risks administrative collapse. No purge risks capture by old networks.

The realistic middle is selective continuity:

• preserve ordinary technical personnel unless evidence supports exclusion;
• prioritize vetting of coercive, judicial, intelligence, and senior political positions;
• distinguish policy disagreement from participation in serious abuse;
• provide appeal from exclusion decisions.

5. Trials can stabilize or destabilize depending on context

Transitional-justice research does not support a simple rule that more prosecutions always produce more peace. ICTJ summarizes evidence suggesting that effects vary by conflict termination, institutional context, and which levels of actors are prosecuted.

This matters for fiction because justice is a political process as well as a legal one. A trial can demonstrate rule of law—or look like victor’s justice if procedures are weak.

6. Truth without accountability is insufficient; accountability without truth can be brittle

Societies need a shared record of what occurred. Otherwise every faction builds its own martyr history.

Truth commissions, archives, judicial findings, investigative journalism, and victim testimony can create a baseline record even when not every wrong is criminally prosecutable.

This is especially important in an AI information environment where synthetic evidence and denial make historical reality contestable.

7. Former parties and successor organizations

Banning a party name does not dissolve the interests, identities, donor networks, staff, local organizations, media relationships, and voters that supported it.

A realistic successor order must decide whether to regulate conduct or identity.

Conduct-based restrictions are more compatible with democratic non-recurrence:

• prohibit financing violations;
• prosecute violence, corruption, or unlawful election interference where evidence supports it;
• require transparent internal governance and finances;
• disqualify specific individuals through lawful processes where justified;
• allow peaceful political beliefs to compete.

Otherwise banned networks reappear underground or under new labels.

8. The security dilemma after victory

Former rulers and former rebels may both fear extermination if they disarm politically. That creates incentives to retain independent coercive capacity.

The post-conflict state must therefore make credible commitments that losing an election will not mean physical destruction or permanent exclusion.

This is the foundation of peaceful rotation of power.

9. The constitutional enemy test

Every constitutional rule should be evaluated with one question:

Would we still accept this rule if our most disliked peaceful political opponents controlled it?

Emergency surveillance, party bans, censorship, executive decrees, immunity, and political prosecutions all look different when imagined in an opponent’s hands.

This is the best safeguard against revolutionary self-exemption.

10. Non-recurrence is more than punishment

A society does not prevent tyranny merely by removing tyrants. It must remove the reproduction mechanisms:

• opaque finance;
• personalized security services;
• captured courts;
• unreviewable surveillance;
• emergency powers without expiration;
• patronage-dependent administration;
• propaganda monopolies;
• absence of meaningful opposition.

If those survive, new actors can use them.

Bottom line for the book

The most realistic revolutionary tragedy is that the people who destroy an oppressive architecture inherit its tools.

The defining question is not whether they hated the old Throne. It is whether they are willing to dismantle powers they now control.

That is the true test of democratic reset.

Source base

• ICTJ, transitional justice and sustainable peace: https://www.ictj.org/latest-news/transitional-justice-countries-emerging-conflict-step-toward-sustainable-peace-and
• ICTJ resource library on vetting: https://www.ictj.org/resource-library
• OHCHR vetting framework (via ICTJ index): https://www.ictj.org/search
• World Bank/UN, Pathways for Peace: https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/fragilityconflictviolence/publication/pathways-for-peace-inclusive-approaches-to-preventing-violent-conflict

External report incorporation

The external reform/revolt and old-elite-recapture reports strengthen the post-conflict paradox. The coalition that can defeat an old order is usually broader than the coalition that can agree on a constitution, transitional justice, economic policy, policing, and legitimate opposition afterward.

The most credible democratic settlement keeps two dangers in view at once: recapture by networks of the old regime and permanent emergency rule by the victorious movement. Vetting and prosecution therefore need individualized evidence, due process, review, and sunset mechanisms, while political-finance and institutional reforms target the structures that allow old power to reproduce itself.