Warlordism in comparative perspective

International Security

Volumn 31, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 41-73

  Marten, Kimberly ^a  

^a Barnard College of Columbia University   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 33847287740     PISSN: 01622889     EISSN: 15314804     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1162/isec.2007.31.3.41     Document Type: Article

References (166)

1. Robert H. Jackson, Quasi-states: Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Third World (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990);
2. and Jeffrey Herbst, "Responding to State Failure in Africa," International Security, Vol. 21, No. 3 (Winter 1996/97), pp. 120-144.
3. Peter D. Little, Somalia: Economy without State (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003);
4. Ken Menkhaus, "Somalia: Political Order in a Stateless Society," Current History, May 1998, pp. 220-224;
5. and Ken Menkhaus, "Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism," Adelphi Paper, No. 364 (London: International Institute for Strategic Studies, 2004).
6. Mancur Olson, "Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development," American Political Science Review, Vol. 87, No. 3 (September 1993), pp. 567-576.
7. Michael C. Desch argues that the presence of an external threat is necessary for strong state cohesion and predicts that the absence of war may lead to state decline. Desch, "War and Strong States, Peace and Weak States?" International Organization, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Spring 1996), pp. 237-268.
8. For a striking first-person anthropological perspective on this, see Rory Stewart, The Places in Between (New York: Harcourt, 2004).
9. This is suggested by Herbst, "Responding to State Failure in Africa."
10. Max Weber defines "modern statehood" as "that community which (successfully) lays claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical violence within a certain territory," and adds that rule in the modern state is legitimated "by virtue of belief in the validity of legal statute and the appropriate ... ju ridical 'competence' founded on rationally devised rules." Weber, "The Profession and Vocation of Politics," in Peter Lassman and Ronald Speirs, eds., Weber: Political Writings (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 310-312 (emphasis in original).
11. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651), C.B. MacPherson, ed. (New York: Penguin, 1980), pp. 185-186.
12. Barnett R. Rubin, Road to Ruin: Afghanistan's Booming Opium Industry (New York: Center on International Cooperation, New York University, 2004).
13. For a description of U.S. policy before the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, see Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and bin Laden, from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004).
14. For a description and debate about the utility of U.S. tactics during the 2001-02 war, see Michael E. O'Hanlon, "A Flawed Masterpiece," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 81, No. 3 (May/June 2002), pp. 47-63;
15. Stephen Biddle, "Afghanistan and the Future of Warfare," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 82, No. 2 (March/April 2003), pp. 31-46;
16. Richard B. Andres, Craig Wills, and Thomas Griffith Jr., "Winning with Allies: The Strategic Value of the Afghan Model," International Security, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Winter 2005/06), pp. 124-160;
17. and Stephen D. Biddle, "Allies, Airpower, and Modern Warfare: The Afghan Model in Afghanistan and Iraq," International Security, Vol. 30, No. 3 (Winter 2005/06), pp. 161-176.
18. Astri Suhrke, Kristian Berg Harpviken, and Arne Strand, Conflictual Peacebuilding: Afghanistan Two Years after Bonn, Report 2004:4 (Oslo: International Peace Research Institute, 2004), p. 45. In a not-for-attribution conversation with the author in Kabul in May 2004, a top Western aid official said that U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad frequently suggested in multilateral strategizing meetings that key warlords should receive cash in return for their cooperation with central governmental laws.
19. For an inside description of U.S. policy in the early 1990s, see John L. Hirsch and Robert B. Oakley, Somalia and Operation Restore Hope: Reflections on Peacemaking and Peacekeeping (Washington, D.C.: United States Institute of Peace Press, 1995). For reports of more recent U.S. support for Somali warlords, see International Crisis Group, "Counter-terrorism in Somalia: Losing Hearts and Minds?" Africa Report, No. 95 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, July 11, 2005);
20. and Craig Timberg, "Mistaken Entry into Clan Dispute Led to U.S. Black Eye in Somalia," Washington Post, July 2, 2006.
21. For critiques of this process in Afghanistan, see Laura Secor, "The Pragmatist," Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 294, No. 1 (July/August 2004), p. 44;
22. Kathy Gannon, "Afghanistan Unbound," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 83, No. 3 (May/June 2004), pp. 35-46;
23. and Suhrke, Harpviken, and Strand, Conflictual Peacebuilding,
24. Prominent examples include Sasha Lezhnev, Crafting Peace: Strategies to Deal with Warlords in Collapsing States (Lanham, Md.: Lexington, 2005);
25. Paul Jackson, "Warlords as Alternative Forms of Governance," Small Wars and Insurgencies, Vol. 14, No. 2 (Summer 2003), pp. 131-150;
26. Gordon Peake, "From Warlords to Peacelords?" Journal of International Affairs, Vol. 56, No. 2 (Spring 2003), pp. 181-191;
27. William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1998);
28. and William Reno, "Mafiya Troubles, Warlord Crises," in Mark R. Beissinger and Crawford Young, eds., Beyond State Crisis? Postcolonial Africa and Post-Soviet Eurasia in Comparative Perspective (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
29. Reno, "Mafiya Troubles, Warlord Crises," p. 106.
30. Reno, Warlord Politics and African States.
31. Lezhnev, Crafting Peace, pp. 2-3.
32. Olson, "Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development," p. 568.
33. Lassman and Speirs, Weber, pp. 313-314.
34. Jackson, "Warlords as Alternative Forms of Governance"; and Peake, "From Warlords to Peacelords?"
35. Arthur Waldron, "The Warlord: Twentieth-Century Chinese Understandings of Violence, Militarism, and Imperialism," American Historical Review, Vol. 96, No. 4 (October 1991), pp. 1073-1100.
36. See Lucian W. Pye, Warlord Politics: Conflict and Coalition in the Modernization of Republican China (New York: Praeger, 1971), pp. 6-9;
37. and James E. Sheridan, China in Disintegration: The Republican Era in Chinese History, 1912-1949 (New York: Free Press, 1975), pp. 12-16.
38. Barnett R. Rubin, "The Political Economy of War and Peace in Afghanistan," World Development, Vol. 28, No. 10 (October 2000), pp. 1789-1803;
39. Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, "Land Disputes Unsettle the North," Afghan Recovery Report, No. 124 (London: Institute for War and Peace Reporting, July 5, 2004); Terrence Lyons and Ahmed I. Samatar, Somalia: State Collapse, Multilateral Intervention, and Strategies for Political Reconstruction (Washington, D.C.: Brookings, 1995);
40. Jarat Chopra, Åge Eknes, and Toralv Nordbø, "Fighting for Hope in Somalia," Peacekeeping and Multinational Operations Report, No. 6 (Oslo: Norwegian Institute of International Affairs, 1995), as reprinted in Journal of Humanitarian Assistance, June 2000, http://www.jha.ac/ articles/a007.htm; and Menkhaus, "Somalia: Political Order in a Stateless Society," p. 222.
41. Joseph R. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univer sity Press, 1970), pp. 13-18;
42. and Gianfranco Poggi, The Development of the Modern State: A Sociological Introduction (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1978), pp. 19-21.
43. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, pp. 27-28;
44. and Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 38-39.
45. Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, pp. 89-90.
46. Ibid., p. 37; and Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, pp. 13-14.
47. Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, p. 19.
48. Ibid., p. 24.
49. Ibid., p. 31.
50. Ibid., p. 27; and Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 37.
51. Sheridan, China in Disintegration, pp. 41-42.
52. Pye, Warlord Politics;
53. and Edward A. McCord, The Power of the Gun: The Emergence of Modern Chinese Warlordism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).
54. McCord, The Power of the Gun, pp. 134-149;
55. and Diana Lary, "Violence, Fear, and Insecurity: The Mood of Republican China," Republican China, Vol. 10, Nos. 2-3 (1985), pp. 57-58.
56. McCord, The Power of the Gun.
57. Pye, Warlord Politics, p. 77.
58. Mary Backus Rankin, "State and Society in Early Republican Politics, 1912-18," China Quarterly, No. 150 (June 1997), p. 270.
59. Hans J. van de Ven, "Public Finance and the Rise of Warlordism," Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (October 1996), pp. 829-868.
60. Sheridan, China in Disintegration, pp. 86-87.
61. Lary, "Violence, Fear, and Insecurity," p. 60.
62. Pye, Warlord Politics, pp. 41-44.
63. McCord, The Power of the Gun, p. 109.
64. Pye, Warlord Politics, p. 54;
65. and Sheridan, China in Disintegration, pp. 78-79.
66. Sheridan, China in Disintegration, p. 89.
67. Ibid., pp. 62-74.
68. Ibid., p. 76.
69. McCord, The Power of the Gun, p. 292.
70. For the best description of this process, see Chopra, Eknes, and Nordbø, "Fighting for Hope in Somalia."
71. Marc Lacey, "U.N. Loses Patience with Somali Custom of Kidnapping," New York Times, May 21, 2002.
72. "U.S. Company Somalia-bound to Fight Pirates," Reuters, November 26, 2005.
73. Little, Somalia: Economy without State, pp. 145-147.
74. Joseph Winter, "Living in Somalia's Anarchy," BBC News, November 18, 2004;
75. and Joseph Winter, "Somalia: Where the Gun Rules," BBC News, February 9, 2005.
76. Marc Lacey, "Mogadishu Journal: To Fuel the Mideast's Grills, Somalia Smolders," New York Times, July 25, 2002.
77. Lyons and Samatar, Somalia, p. 18.
78. Ibid., pp. 21-22, 45-46; and Ameen Jan, "Somalia: Building Sovereignty or Restoring Peace?" in Elizabeth M. Cousens and Chetan Kumar, eds., Peacebuilding as Politics: Cultivating Peace in Fragile Societies (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 2001), pp. 53-54.
79. William J. Durch, "Introduction to Anarchy: Humanitarian Intervention and 'State-building' in Somalia," in Durch, ed., UN Peacekeeping, American Policy, and the Uncivil Wars of the 1990s (New York: St. Martin's, 1996), p. 329.
80. Little, Somalia: Economy without State, p. 47.
81. Ibid., pp. 49, 151.
82. Ibid., p. 152.
83. Winter, "Living in Somalia's Anarchy."
84. International Crisis Group, "Somalia: Continuation of War by Other Means?" Africa Report, No. 88 (Brussels: International Crisis Group, December 21, 2004); and Menkhaus, Somalia: State Collapse and the Threat of Terrorism.
85. Ian Fisher, "Mogadishu Journal: Somali Business Thwarted by Too-Free Enterprise," New York Times, August 10, 2000.
86. Barnett R. Rubin, The Fragmentation of Afghanistan: State Formation and Collapse in the International System, 2d ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2002), pp. 184-191.
87. Ibid., p. 256.
88. Jon Sawyer, "Most Afghan Warlords Ignore Calls to Disarm before Elections," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 16, 2004.
89. William Byrd and Stéphane Guimbert, "Afghanistan: Managing Public Finances for Development," Vol. 1, Report 34582-AF (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, December 22, 2005).
90. Bashir Babak and Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, "Afghanistan: When Cops Become Robbers," Afghan Recovery Report, No. 170 (London: Institute for War and Peace Reporting, April 29, 2005).
91. Sayed Salahuddin, "Trade in Afghan South Seen Hurt by Anti-drug Drive," Reuters, June 9, 2005; and N.C. Aizenman, "Opium Trade Not Easily Uprooted, Afghanistan Finds," Washington Post, July 16, 2005.
92. William McCarten and Javier Suarez, "Trade and Regional Cooperation between Afghanistan and Its Neighbors," Report No. 26769 (Washington, D.C.: World Bank, February 18, 2004).
93. "Rights Body Warns of Warlords' Success in Elections" (Geneva: United Nations International Regional Information Networks, October 18, 2005), http://www.irinnews.org.
94. For the example of warlord Sher Mohammed Akhunzada in Helmand Province, see Ahmed Rashid, "Chief Ousted as British Troops Head for Afghan Drug Region," Daily Telegraph (London), December 23, 2005.
95. "Creeping towards the Marketplace," Economist, February 4, 2006, p. 58.
96. "Soldiers and Police Clash in Afghan City," New York Times, May 1, 2005;
97. and Griff Witte, "Some See Hand of Former Governor behind Muslim Clash in Afghanistan," Washington Post, February 21, 2006.
98. Andrew North, "Following the Afghan Drugs Trail," BBC News, June 4, 2004;
99. and an untitled report in Eqteaar-e Melli, a weekly newspaper, July 15, 2004, translated from Dari into English and reprinted in the Moby Capital Updates daily email news service, July 15, 2004.
100. Sayed Yaqub Ibrahimi, "Standing Up to the Warlords," Afghan Recovery Report, No. 153 (London: Institute for War and Peace Reporting, December 17, 2004).
101. Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors.
102. Charles Tilly, "Reflections on the History of European State-Making," in Tilly, ed., The Formation of National States in Western Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1975), pp. 3-83.
103. This includes the classic philosopher Max Weber, in "The Profession and Vocation of Politics"; the Marxist Perry Anderson, in Lineages of the Absolutist State (New York: Verso, 1974);
104. the historian Joseph Strayer, in On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State;
105. the sociologist Gianfranco Poggi, in The Development of the Modern State;
106. and the political scientist Hendrik Spruyt, in The Sovereign State and Its Competitors.
107. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, p. 18;
108. and Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, pp. 35-40.
109. Lassman and Speirs, Weber, pp. 314, 329;
110. and Poggi, The Development of the Modern State, pp. 1, 37.
111. Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors.
112. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, pp. 24-27.
113. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, pp. 21-23;
114. and Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State, p. 426.
115. Strayer, On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State, p. 24;
116. and Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors, p. 104.
117. Anderson, Lineages of the Absolutist State.
118. Ibid., pp. 420-154.
119. Kathleen Hartford and Steven M. Goldstein, eds., Single Sparks: China's Rural Revolutions (Armonk, N.Y.: M.E. Sharpe, 1989).
120. This is the claim made by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday in their highly controversial volume Mao: The Unknown Story (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005).
121. This is a theme throughout Lloyd E. Eastman, Jerome Ch'en, Suzanne Pepper, and Lyman P. Van Slyke, The Nationalist Era in China, 1927-1949 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991). See also Edgar O'Ballance, The Red Army of China: A Short History (New York: Praeger, 1962), p. 19.
122. Sheridan, China in Disintegration, p. 39.
123. Van de Ven, "Public Finance and the Rise of Warlordism," pp. 860-861.
124. Lary, "Violence, Fear, and Insecurity," p. 59.
125. The Manchu were ethnically distinct from the majority Han Chinese, and although nationalism over time transformed itself into the idea of Chinese citizens rising up against foreign imperialism, it was first expressed as a Han ethnic movement. See Suisheng Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction: Dynamics of Modern Chinese Nationalism (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004);
126. and Suisheng Zhao, "Nationalism's Double Edge," Wilson Quarterly, Vol. 29, No. 4 (Autumn 2005), pp. 76-82.
127. Sheridan, China in Disintegration, pp. 119-120, 150;
128. and Edward A. McCord, "Warlords against Warlordism: The Politics of Anti-militarism in Early Twentieth-Century China," Modern Asian Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4 (October 1996), pp. 795-796.
129. Jean Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919-1927, trans. H.M. Wright (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1968).
130. Ibid., p. 142.
131. Jonathan D. Spence, The Search for Modern China (New York: W.W. Norton, 1990), p. 313.
132. Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction, p. 74.
133. Ibid., pp. 82-83.
134. Brantly Womack, "Warlordism and Military Regionalism in China," in Richard H. Yang, Jason C. Hu, Peter K.H. Yu, and Andrew N.D. Yang, eds., Chinese Regionalism: The Security Dimension (Boulder, Colo.: Westview, 1994), p. 26.
135. Chesneaux, The Chinese Labor Movement, 1919-1927, pp. 206-213.
136. O'Ballance, The Red Army of China, p. 19.
137. Sheridan, China in Disintegration, pp. 62-63.
138. Ibid., p. 152.
139. Zhao, A Nation-State by Construction, p. 83
140. The following description is drawn from Sheridan, China in Disintegration, pp. 152-155;
141. and Arthur Waldron, "War and the Rise of Nationalism in Twentieth-Century China," Journal of Military History, Vol. 57, No. 5 (October 1993), pp. 90-93.
142. Chang and Halliday, Mao, p. 40.
143. Sheridan, China in Disintegration, p. 186.
144. Lloyd E. Eastman, "Nationalist China during the Nanking Decade, 1927-1937," in Eastman et al., The Nationalist Era in China, 1927-1949, pp. 8-11;
145. and Ramon H. Myers, "The Chinese State during the Republican Era," in David Shambaugh, ed., The Modern Chinese State (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000), pp. 42-72.
146. McCord, "Warlords against Warlordism," p. 824.
147. O'Ballance, The Red Army of China, pp. 57-63;
148. and Gregor Benton, New Fourth Army: Communist Resistance along the Yangtze and the Huai, 1938-41 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 102.
149. McCord, The Power of the Gun, pp. 35, 56.
150. Waldron, "The Warlord," p. 1088.
151. Waldron, "War and the Rise of Nationalism in Twentieth-Century China," p. 95.
152. McCord, "Warlords against Warlordism."
153. Hans Van de Ven, "The Military in the Republic," China Quarterly, No. 150 (June 1997), p. 360.
154. His argument is supported by Spence, The Search for Modern China, p. 312.
155. Little, Somalia: Economy without State.
156. Ibid., p. 152.
157. Menkhaus, "Somalia: Political Order in a Stateless Society," p. 224.
158. Joseph Winter, "Telecoms Thriving in Lawless Somalia," BBC News, November 19, 2004, http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/4020259.stm.
159. Little, Somalia: Economy without State, p. 143; and International Crisis Group, "Counter-terrorism in Somalia," p. 16.
160. Ownership of cattle originally set apart the wealthy elite in many sub-Saharan African social systems, so at an ethnographic level they may not be considered low value.
161. Winter, "Living in Somalia's Anarchy."
162. Little, Somalia: Economy without State, p. 147.
163. International Programs Office, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, University of California, Davis, Rehabilitating Agriculture in Afghanistan: Horticultural Market Survey (Aleppo, Syria: International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, October 2003).
164. Maia Szalavitz, "Let a Thousand Licensed Poppies Bloom," New York Times, July 13, 2005.
165. Shirazuddin Siddiqi, "Film Sheds Light on Afghan Exodus," BBC News, February 13, 2006.
166. A prominent example was the September 2005 resignation of Interior Minister Ali Ahmad Jalali, who was prevented from making headway in sidelining warlords and prosecuting the opium trade. N.C. Aizenman, "Afghan Interior Minister Quits after Complaining of Graft," Washington Post, September 28, 2005.