Why is peace hard to build after civil war? The dominant peacebuilding frameworks emphasize international-domestic alignments and a normative package of internationally-promoted reforms. By contrast, this book project reorients the analysis to the domestic politics of post-war recovery, underlining the power-seeking, rent-seeking, and security dynamics that undercut peacebuilding. The project operates from the premise that post-war peace is built over time through expanding political trust and state legitimacy; civil wars fracture authority, hijack institutions, and hence produce states where trust and legitimacy are especially low. The problem is particularly acute among non-co-partisans of incumbents. Peacebuilding is fundamentally about reversing that postwar status quo and establishing confidence in institutions. Yet the domestic politics of post-war states often handcuff rulers, prompting them more often than not to repress, exclude, and distribute in ways that undermine peacebuilding. This “peacebuilding pathology” is hard to overcome, usually resulting in civil war recidivism or political arrangements that keep peace but do not build it, or both. The project elaborates on this problem theoretically by isolating the political dynamics that undermine peacebuilding, hypothesizing that different configurations produce different post-war equilibria, or a stable variation in post-war political orders. The paper further names and describes various post-war political orders. Empirically, the paper plots variations in post-war orders, primarily focusing on Sub-Saharan African cases. The paper further illustrates the claims through snapshot cases of Côte d’Ivoire, Rwanda, Mozambique, and Cambodia.