Bringing War Back In (Cambridge University Press, 2024) reexamines the theory connecting war and state building offering an account that fits Latin America. Unlike scholarship that focuses on wartime mobilization, this book explores the lasting effects of unpredictable war outcomes in the post-war period. While all states strengthen during war, it is the war’s outcome that determines the survival of fragile wartime coalitions, leading to long-term differences between winners and losers. Victorious states legitimize and consolidate the institutions and policies created for war, while defeated states experience prolonged declines in state capacity. In nineteenth-century Latin America, states consistently survived frequent and intense warfare, making it an ideal context to examine the long-term effects of war outcomes. Leveraging statistics and archival evidence the book shows how international threats systematically triggered state building and how victors and losers were set into divergent paths that rigidified in a peaceful twentieth century. Overall, the book offers a new and compelling explanation for the levels of state capacity that we see today both within Latin America and beyond.

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