ABSTRACT
A political settlement reflects how power is structured between a country’s elite factions and clarifies how practices of rule emerge from these relations. In limited access orders, different types of political settlement provide elite factions with different options of violence as ultima ratio regum. These include maintaining their own armed organizations, coopting those of the state, running networks of influence across armed organizations, or a mix. Such coercive capabilities can operate under different profiles, i.e. their basic orientation about why and against whom they can threaten or use force. When shifts or shocks to a political settlement destabilize it, violent crisis or civil war may ensue. This further weakens a political settlement and tempts elite factions to shift armed organizations under their control to operate under a hybrid coercive profile. Under this profile, an armed organization competes and collaborates with government forces at the same time. This has the advantage of enabling an elite faction to expand its power base more autonomously while staying close enough to the original arrangement of rule to avoid outright hostilities. The conceptual addition of this profile to the study of civil war helps us to understand why post-war political settlements risk being unstable and can relapse into violence.
