On the Rights of Warlords: Legitimate Authority and Basic Protection in War-Torn Societies

Abstract

This article examines the legitimacy of the use of force by armed nonstate actors resisting the imposition of state rule over territories they control. We focus on the rights of warlords: subnational strongmen who seek autonomy within geographically demarcated territories, but not secession or control of the state itself. We argue that behind the resistance to state-building lies a twofold question of legitimate authority: the authority of states to consolidate power within their own internationally recognized borders and the authority of warlords to resist that expansion, by force if necessary, when it threatens social order and the protection of basic rights. This article draws on just war theory to develop a set of conditions under which such resistance may be justified, explores the argument's practical implications for state-building under the tutelage of third parties (e.g., the United Nations), and demonstrates its empirical relevance through an application to Afghanistan.

How State Presence Leads to Civil Conflict

“…In Puntland of Somalia, for example, the regional government founded by clan leaders and elders is more functional than the central government (Menkhaus 2007). Similarly, dozos 5 in Cote d'Ivoire routinely perform state-like functions such as policing (Blair and Kalmanovitz 2016). Contrary to expectations in the literature, then, regional non-state authorities do not fight endlessly in the absence of the state.…”

“…While the state is absent, most of these peripheral regions are inhabited by indigenous people, who have over time formed their own social order (Blair and Kalmanovitz 2016). These communities have developed economic selfsustainability and self-sufficiency.…”

“…For example, the escalation of "strongman" governance in several important Afghan provinces has been acquiesced by the Karzai regime in the early 2000s (Mukhopadhyay 2014). Similarly, Somalia left the Puntland region almost completely to ethnic leaders in 1998 (Blair and Kalmanovitz 2016).…”

Beyond Counterinsurgency: Peasant Militias and Wartime Social Order in Peru’s Civil War

“…2. Although as Blair & Kalmanovitz (2016) explain, warlords can also organise and recruit militia, I would argue that the Peruvian Comités de Autodefensa (CADs) differ typologically from such warlord militias in a number of significant ways. Whereas warlords are "subnational strongmen who seek autonomy within geographically demarcated territories" (2016, p. 428), I show that certain state-controlled mechanisms prevented the rise of CAD warlords.…”

“…In particular, the social order they bring about, and their aspects as agents of local governance, social reconstruction, and positive transformations within their own communities, have been under-researched (cf. Theidon 2006;Hoffman 2007;Blair & Kalmanovitz 2016). Whereas much of the research has focused on the disorder that militias are often observed to bring, any normalising order that they shape garners much less attention in comparison.…”