The Origins, Organization, and Perhaps Demise of Armed Resistance to the State

Abstract

Warlords: Strong-Arm Brokers in Weak States. By Kimberly Marten. New York: Cornell University Press, 2012. 280 pp., $35.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-801-45076-1). Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life During War. By Zachariah Cherian Mampilly. New York: Cornell University Press, 2011. 320 pp., $45.00 hardcover (ISBN-13: 978-0-801-44913-0). Weak states and destabilizing insurgencies continue to be global concerns in the twenty-first century. The two books reviewed in this essay— Warlords: Strong-Arm Brokers in Weak States by Kimberly Marten and Rebel Rulers: Insurgent Governance and Civilian Life During War by Zachariah Mampilly—detail how insurgencies function, flourish, and perhaps fail. These books will be essential resources for graduate students, policymakers, and scholars of states struggling with armed resistance. In Warlords, Marten provides a wonderfully nuanced description of the relationship between states and warlords. Warlords are individuals who require some level of state support and protection, but ultimately undermine state capacity by controlling small pieces of territory using a combination of force and patronage. In four substantive chapters, Marten gracefully outlines the trajectory of warlordism as a function of state construction in Pakistan, Georgia, Chechnya, and Iraq. Marten displays great depth of knowledge, and her description is rife with anecdotes, insider information, and humor, making it authoritative and enjoyable to read. In her first chapter on Pakistan's contested border region with Afghanistan, Marten describes how tribal allegiance to the Pakistani state was secured through investing in development initiatives over which local Malik leaders had control. In return for their loyalty, the state gave Maliks unfettered access to patronage resources, turning a blind eye to extensive smuggling and corruption. Popular resentment against the Maliks led to the emergence of radical Islamist Mullahs who replaced the Maliks as local powerbrokers in the 1970s. Buoyed by external funding from the Sunni diaspora, the Mullah imposed Sharia law, assassinated Maliks, and ran free religious schools. Migration to the Persian Gulf to work in the oil fields in the late 1970s may have provided “a potential alternative mechanism for social evolution,” by challenging the established patronage system and social order, but it ended unexpectedly with an …