Rebel governance as wartime order: taxation, civilian protection and post-conflict political authority in eastern Congo, a comparative process-tracing design

The central problem is that existing scholarship treats wartime order and post-conflict order as separate domains, leaving unexamined the mechanisms through which rebel institutions of taxation and civilian protection persist into peace. Rebel governance should be conceptualised as a form of wartime order whose institutional legacies condition post-conflict authority through two distinct pathways: fiscal extraction creates durable claims on civilian populations, while protection provision generates legitimacy that can be converted into political authority after conflict ends. The design employs comparative process-tracing across rebel-held territories in North and South Kivu, tracing the mechanisms linking wartime institutions to post-conflict outcomes. The paper specifies observable implications, considers rival explanations, and establishes boundary conditions for the argument. The contribution is a theoretically grounded design for causal inference about institutional persistence that does not require invented data, offering a template for comparative research on rebel governance and post-conflict order.