| Summary: | Party-building is notoriously difficult. Recent scholarship has shown that a high proportion of the few successful parties to have emerged in Latin America in the last 50 years were formed after exceptional conditions of polarization and conflict. This thesis addresses a subset of parties formed under the most extreme form of conflict: war. Insurgent Successor Parties (ISPs) pose very specific challenges and opportunities for party-building, yet we lack a clear understanding of the factors that lead to their failure or success. This thesis builds on prior research and offers a novel explanation based on the legacies of conflict and intra- and inter-party relations. I leverage evidence from one successful case, the <em>Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional</em> (FMLN) in El Salvador, to illuminate the key factors that facilitated its success, and compare it against a very similar but negative case, the <em>Movimiento 19 de Abril</em> (M-19) in Colombia, showing where their trajectories diverged. I rely on careful process-tracing analysis and 120 in-depth interviews, combined with data analysis of textual, audio, and visual archive evidence, including private material from former guerrilla fighters and state forces. This strategy informs a rich theoretical model that provides a rare view into the meso- and microfoundations and processes that have facilitated or complicated party durability and effectiveness. The research underscores the value of taking a step back from macropolitical and structural explanations to look at the dynamics of resource acquisition and decision-making by key actors within parties. More specifically, it argues that war and post-war democratic competition are essential to the process of devising the unique symbolic and material resources without which parties cannot function and endure over time.
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