Journal ArticleDOI
Warlords as alternative forms of Governance
TLDR
The term "warlord" has become an ugly, detrimental expression, evoking brutality, racketeering and terrorism as mentioned in this paper, and the demonisation of the Taliban and the elevation of the former warlords of the opposition to the rather more grandiose sounding "Northern Alliance" implies that the term 'warlord' is synonymous with anarchy, violence and a breakdown in civilised values.Abstract:
Warlord is a label that currently besets us on all fronts. The 2001–2002 military action in Afghanistan is illustrative of the West's ambivalent view of armed factions in the developing world in general. The demonisation of the Taliban and the elevation of the former ‘warlords’ of the opposition to the rather more grandiose sounding ‘Northern Alliance’, at once formalising the hitherto informal nature of the warlord system, implies that the term ‘warlord’ is synonymous with anarchy, violence and a breakdown in civilised values. ‘Warlord’ has become an ugly, detrimental expression, evoking brutality, racketeering and terrorism. Analysts referring to violence across developing countries routinely refer to ‘new wars’ and ‘post-modern’ conflict, and yet the language used to describe these phenomena is usually pre-modern (medievalism, baronial rule, new feudalism). This article outlines some examples of historical warlords and draws out the common issues. In particular it emphasises the fact that warlords have...read more
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Journal ArticleDOI
Empowerment or Imposition? Dilemmas of Local Ownership in Post-Conflict Peacebuilding Processes
TL;DR: The authors examines questions of local ownership in post-conflict peacebuilding and makes the case that the complex relationship between insiders and outsiders lies at the very heart of contemporary peacebuilding processes.
Journal ArticleDOI
Warlordism in Comparative Perspective
TL;DR: In this article, a comparative study of four seemingly disparate cases (medieval Europe, Republican China, Somalia and Afghanistan) was conducted to develop an inductive, generalizable definition of warlordism, where armed men seize small slices of territory in disintegrating states for their own benefit, using charisma and patronage ties to cement their local authority.
Journal ArticleDOI
Chasing Shadows: Strategic Responses to Organised Crime in Conflict-Affected Situations
TL;DR: Cockayne explores the relationship between criminal groups and political power, debunking longheld myths that such groups are primarily economic actors, before considering how a more strategic, evidence-based approach to tackling organized crime in conflict-affected states might be developed and implemented as mentioned in this paper.
Book
Hidden Power: The Strategic Logic of Organized Crime
TL;DR: Cockayne as discussed by the authors discovers the strategic logic of organized crime, hidden in a century of forgotten political-criminal collaboration in New York, Sicily and the Caribbean, revealing states and mafias competing and collaborating in a competition for governmental power.
Journal ArticleDOI
State fragility and governance: Conflict mitigation and subnational perspectives
TL;DR: In this article, the authors argue that conflict mitigation is a useful mechanism for adapting a relatively standardised democratising template to conditions in fragile states and that subnational reforms have important potential to mitigate the drivers identified in quantitative studies of conflict.
References
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Journal ArticleDOI
Greed and Grievance: Economic Agendas in Civil Wars
Journal ArticleDOI
Post‐modern conflict: Warlords, post‐adjustment states and private protection
TL;DR: In this article, the authors provide a critical alternative to two key aspects of conventional wisdom in international policy: the prevailing notion of internal or intra-state war as bounded by traditional views of the nation-state, and the development model of conflict which regards so-called internal war as originating from poverty, scarcity or weak institutions.