Sometimes they can have a marriage of convenience with the central government. Since warlords control unrecognized territories, they need to work with states in order to survive. As she warns, “tolerating warlordism means accepting a future of political backwardness and illiberalism, and all of its potential economic and security consequences.” Furthermore, the longer warlords hold on to power, the stronger they become, and the harder it is to get rid of them. However, as Marten points out, such deals seldom appease warlords rather they empower them. It is worth noting–although Marten does not raise the point–that international organizations operating in weak states have also made deals with warlords for the sake of short-term expediency.

Under this Faustian bargain, she wrote, “as long as de jure sovereignty was preserved, de facto control over the territory was ceded.” In other cases, like Russia’s support for Ramzan Kadyrov in Chechnya or Pakistan’s relations with tribal leaders in the FATA, the state outsourced a piece of its sovereignty in a remote and/or hard to control territory to someone that it hoped it could work with. As they discovered, the problem is that tribal leaders can be as manipulative as their patrons. The British tried to do this with the Pashtun tribes on either side of the Durand Line between Afghanistan and Pakistan in the mid-19th century. In some cases (like Georgia’s relations with Abkhazia in the early 1990s), the central government made a virtue out of necessity because it could not defeat the warlord, so it struck a bargain with him. Yet, as Marten points out, there may be times when states tolerate or even encourage warlords. As a result, the state loses its monopoly on the use of force. This is easier to do in failing states because there is less resistance. Marten, quoting historian David Herrmann, believes that “warlordism is the default condition of humanity.” She argues that “potential specialists in violence are always amongst us,” and, given the chance, they will take control over a specific territory using force and patronage. Where the central government is unable or unwilling to exercise its sovereignty, others will fill the void. She concludes with a number of lessons and hypotheses about warlords and sovereignty.Īs the saying goes, nature abhors a vacuum. In her new book Warlords, Kimberly Marten introduces us to these strong-arm brokers in weak states, particularly Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), Georgia, Iraq, and Chechnya. They are usually controlled by de facto authorities who may be better armed and better organized than the state that they have broken away from. A few years ago it was fashionable to describe some of the world’s badlands as “ungoverned spaces.” Yet these areas outside the control of the central government-for example, in Afghanistan or Somalia-are not lawless.

Warlords call to arms controls