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Past research has argued that leaders care about their post-tenure fates and that consideration of these circumstances can motivate policy choices. But, so far, there has been little theorizing on why some successors let leaders walk away while others meet more dismal ends. I provide a regime-based argument for this variation that predicts that personalist leaders will be more likely to experience negative post-tenure fates (exile, imprisonment, and death) than democratic and other autocratic counterparts. The reason is that personalist leaders' legitimacy is uniquely tied to their personal traits. So long as the former despot is living and near, he poses a threat to his successors. I test my argument on a sample of leaders (1945–2004) and find that the legitimacy argument predicts leader outcomes even while accounting for rival arguments such as a need for retribution, means of exit, militarization of regime, and past history.

AbstractPast research has argued that leaders care about their post-tenure fates and that consideration of these circumstances can motivate policy choices. But, so far, there has been little theorizing on why some successors let leaders walk away while others meet more dismal ends. I provide a regime-based argument for this variation that predicts that personalist leaders will be more likely to experience negative post-tenure fates (exile, imprisonment, and death) than democratic and other autocratic counterparts. The reason is that personalist leaders' legitimacy is uniquely tied to their personal traits. So long as the former despot is living and near, he poses a threat to his successors. I test my argument on a sample of leaders (1945–2004) and find that the legitimacy argument predicts leader outcomes even while accounting for rival arguments such as a need for retribution, means of exit, militarization of regime, and past history.

In the past 25 years, the United Nations has sanctioned 28 rebel groups in 13 civil wars. Have the UN sanctions been effective in meeting the goal of conflict reduction? In this article, we argue that UN sanctions are effective to the extent that they can constrain and weaken some rebel groups. But this constraining effect can only occur when UN sanctions curtail rebel groups' ability to adapt. For less adaptable groups, UN sanctions can trigger a causal chain of depressed rebel income, territorial losses, and battlefield defeats that leads to conflict reduction. This adaptability is the key to the understanding of UN sanctions' effectiveness in conflict reduction, as rebel groups often engage in illegal and criminal economic activities and many of them are 'Hydra-like', being able to shift their income sources in response to sanction measures. As evidence of how UN sanctions can trigger these conflict dynamics, we first perform negative binomial regression on all civil war cases. We then proceed to provide more detailed evidence for our causal chain by conducting time-series intervention analysis on two sanctioned rebel groups: UNITA in Angola and al-Shabaab in Somalia. Our work is the first systematic quantitative analysis of UN sanctions' effects on rebel groups, and the results have implications for the viability of economic coercion as a means to intervene into civil conflicts.