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Key Text Introduction: Warlord Politics and African States

Author: W Reno
Date: 1998
Size: 13 pages

Summary

Why has warlord politics developed in weak states? Which factors promote dissolution into factional struggle and which generally help weak-state rulers to reassert their political authority through warlord means? This chapter argues that in order to answer these questions, it is important to analyse not the formal role of institutions, but rulers' efforts to manage external challenges and the reconfiguration of old patron-client politics.

Most reformers aim to build a state that acts as a neutral institution under the rule of law and that is engaged in promoting compromises and resolving conflicts among individuals and groups. Yet, in Liberia, Sierra Leone, Zaire and Nigeria, less government has contributed not to better government but to warlord politics. Rather than being cut off from changes in the global economy, Africa's weak states have emerged as a new form of authority suited to operating on the margins of that economy. Weak states shed light on a new organisation of global capital that exploits commercial opportunities previously out of reach and it does so from a stance in which the exercise of political authority is almost indistinguishable from private commercial operations.

In these cases, rulers reject the pursuit of a broader project of creating a state that serves a collective good or even of creating institutions that are capable of developing independent perspectives and acting on behalf of interests distinct from the rulers' personal exercise of power.

Economic development is abjured when it threatens to put resources into the hands of those who might use them to challenge the rulers' position.

Consequently, anxious rulers contract a wide array of economic roles to outsiders, in part to deny resources to internal rivals and to use outsiders' skills and connections to gather as much wealth as possible.
Rulers then convert wealth into political resources, buying the loyalty of some and buying weapons to coerce others, in turn gathering more resources.
More significantly, the virtual total collapse of bureaucratic state institutions means outsiders also take on a wider range of political roles conventionally reserved for state institutions, such as providing internal security for rulers and diplomatic relations with outsiders.
Warlord rulers and their allies also disrupt authority in other states. They ignore the significance of frontiers if they obstruct efforts to control markets, clandestine or visible.

It is important to understand how warlords really operate rather than dwelling on the collapse of state institutions that are a consequence, rather than a cause, of those politics.

Liberalisation of the markets is a major external factor affecting weak-state rulers' pursuit of authority.
Liberalisation has hastened the privatisation of state assets into the hands of private commercial networks of politicians on which rulers base their personal power.
Reform that emphasises economic and political liberalisation further undermines weak-state rulers incentives to pursue conventional strategies for maximising power through generating economic growth and, hence, state revenues.
At the same time, new entrepreneurial opportunities may become available to individual officials and other strongmen whose broader interests run counter to those of the ruler.
Rulers cannot mobilise popular support against strongmen within the population, since most weak states lack legitimacy.
Reform in this direction would require more government and stronger institutions, which are precluded by threatening strongmen and fiscal austerity of reforms.

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Source: Reno, W.,1998, ‘Introduction’ in Warlord Politics and African States, Lynne Rienner publications, London
Author: Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, http://www.wcas.northwestern.edu/polisci/index.html