Chapter 7 lays the foundations for the second half of the book, which focuses on the question of institutional persistence within and beyond conflict. It chronicles the road to political transition and peace in both Guatemala and Nicaragua. The chapter then examines a key difference between the two settings: the coalitional configurations that emerged from war. It provides an in-depth examination of how these dynamics played out within the three institution-level cases examined in the previous chapters. Specifically, it illustrates how the Moreno Network and Detective Corps in Guatemala laid the foundations of institutional survival by broadening the distributional coalition—the web of interest groups with a stake in the fraudulent customs arrangements and extrajudicial killing, respectively. Meanwhile, the FSLN’s transformation into the political opposition in Nicaragua following its 1990 electoral defeat resulted in persistent coalitional volatility, which bred chronic instability within postwar institutions.

Chapter 2 presents the book’s theory of wartime institutional change, which accounts for why civil war is a site of institutional transformation, conceptualizes different wartime institutional logics, and elaborates the causal process through which undermining rules evolve amid conflict. It argues that the perceived escalation of the insurgent threat within civil war unsettles prevailing institutional arrangements and empowers political and military elites who, as the architects of counterinsurgency, possess high levels of decision-making discretion. Under the pretext of combatting the “internal enemy,” this counterinsurgent elite introduces alternative rules of the game, which correspond to its narrow interests. The latter half of the chapter tackles why undermining rules persist within and beyond conflict. Where counterinsurgent leaders can knit together a broader set of interests with a stake in the wartime procedures and successfully co-opt new peacetime political and economic spaces, the undermining rules are more likely to survive. By contrast, shifting postwar elite alignments generate chronic instability, disrupting the institutional status quo.

The concluding chapter explores the often-contradictory relationship between democracy and enduring state violence and the intervening role of inequality. It builds on the book’s key findings to further elucidate the problem that policing poses for democracy, in theory and in practice. The repertoires and distribution of protection and repression in the cases analyzed in this book – and indeed, in many other democracies – are antithetical to what some scholars view as the substantive principles and outcomes of democracy. Yet, these practices are often reinforced by the electoral and participatory processes other scholars have identified as constitutive of democracy. This book’s analysis of three police forces therefore lays bare a tension between procedural and substantive dimensions of democracy. In order to elucidate this tension, the concluding chapter disaggregates democracy and considers how these two dimensions may come to be at odds with one another. The chapter considers how the input of democracy – citizens’ preferences and demands – is channeled through democratic processes such as elections and participatory institutions to produce substantive outcomes that are antithetical to democratic principles. Key to understanding how quintessentially democratic processes result in authoritarian policing practices and structures is the distortions introduced by inequality to each dimension of democracy.