Sabine Carey was presented joint research with Belén González on how pro-government militias (PGMs) affect repression in post-war societies at the workshop on ‘Micro-level perspective on peace’ at the University of Birmingham, 19 September 2018, organised by Martin Ottoman and Felix Haass and at the APSA Annual Convention in Boston. In this paper, they show that PGMs are associated with higher levels of repression after an armed conflict, this deterioration in human rights is driven by militias that already existed in the preceding conflict rather than ones that newly formed in the post-war period.