The Day After Overthrow: How the Behavior of the State and the Resistance Shapes Post-Overthrow Outcomes (ARIS)

The Day After Overthrow asks the question that most resistance research leaves out. Not how a movement wins, but what kind of government it leaves behind. The study identifies sixty-nine post-1945 cases in which a resistance movement achieved its goal and survived five years, then runs a correlation analysis on thirty-nine of them to find which characteristics of the old state and of the movement travel with good governance afterwards. This page records what the document is, what it contains, where it came from, and links the full text hosted by The Resistance Hub.

What this document is

The study opens by naming its own motive. Some post-transition governments are swallowed by recurring civil war. Others respect human rights, remain stable and become reliable allies of the United States. An ARSOF operator who may be asked to support a movement needs to understand which factors have historically travelled with which outcome, and the honest answer is that the literature on resistance mostly stops at the moment of victory.

Governance is defined before it is measured, which is the study’s most important methodological choice. It is treated as a government’s capacity to function as an institution and to respond to its citizens: to fund itself, to staff offices with competent people, to legislate, to provide security inside its borders, to defend its citizens from attack, and to deliver services. That is a deliberately unromantic definition and it makes the coding possible.

Cases were drawn from the Polity IV dataset, selecting transitions coded as complete collapse of central political authority or as a transition period in executive recruitment and political competition. Sixty-nine cases met the test of a movement achieving its goal and enduring five years. Each was placed on a magnitude of overthrow scale running from judicial review and forced electoral reform at the low end, through institutional disruption and forced constitutional reform, to forced removal of the head of government and complete overthrow of the government. Analysis then concentrated on the thirty-nine cases of forced constitutional reform and forced removal of the head of government, because those two categories held enough cases to support statistics.

The study is careful about what it is. It says in the executive summary that a correlation study lets an operator see which variables tend to appear together and is not a predictive guarantee of how a situation will play out. That restraint runs through the appendices, which document the general method, the full variable list, the coding, the findings, a pooled analysis across multiple overthrow types, and histograms for the significant associations. Variables removed for correlation with other predictors are named, including urbanisation, substantive social policies, changing international alliances and jus sanguinis citizenship, along with the two criteria used to decide which of a correlated pair to drop.

One boundary is worth knowing before you cite it. The case set deliberately excludes any transition with fewer than five years of post-transition history, which the appendix states as excluding 2014 onward. The findings therefore describe the twentieth century and the first decade of the twenty-first, and say nothing directly about the transitions that followed.

Contents

An executive summary, a single continuous argument, and seven appendices carrying the data. Section titles below are the document’s own.

Provenance and lineage

This is an original study with no Special Operations Research Office predecessor, and it sits at the far end of the ARIS catalogue from the 1960s case work. Its intellectual debt inside the series is visible in the figures: the findings are set against the five states of resistance from Understanding States of Resistance and against the doctrinal phases of unconventional warfare, which is how a statistical study of governance outcomes is tied back to the operational framework the reader already knows.

Melissa Ellison of the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory is named as lead author, with Meg Keiley-Listermann, Robert Leonhard, Julie Obenauer-Motley, Elise Roberts, Stephanie Tolbert and Joe Warfield contributing. Leonhard edited the second edition of Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare and led the ARIS case studies on countering unconventional warfare, so the connection to the older half of the catalogue runs through him.

The research was carried out at the Applied Physics Laboratory by its National Security Analysis Department, described on the copyright page as a nongovernmental agency operating under the supervision of the USASOC Sensitive Activities Division. The standard series disclaimer applies. Neither an edition statement nor a date of publication appears in the front matter, and the acknowledgments page is printed without content.

How The Resistance Hub uses it

This is the study we cite whenever coverage runs past the moment a government falls. Our reporting on what comes next for Syria works through exactly the question this document formalises, which is whether the behaviour of the old state and of the movement that displaced it tells you anything useful about the government that follows. The magnitude of overthrow scale is a more precise instrument than the language of regime change, because it distinguishes a forced constitutional reform from a complete overthrow rather than treating both as a win.

It should be read alongside Understanding States of Resistance, whose resolution states describe how a movement arrives at the point this study starts from, and with an eye on the limits: a correlation study on thirty-nine cases, none of them after 2013. For the wider field see resistance core concepts, our survey of resistance movements, and the ARIS archive.

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