Warlords

The Phenomenon of the Warlord

The warlord phenomenon is not a new challenge for governments and the international community. On the contrary, warlords have been constant companions of wars since the ancient times and the medieval period. In particular, the situation in Britain in the early Middle Ages with a number of rival armed local commanders, dukes, and lords is seen as a historical precedent. But also during the Thirty Years' War of the 17th century, feudal warlords—Max Weber used the terms Kriegsfürst and Kriegsfürstentum—dominated European battlefields. They recruited and paid their own soldiers, and they were known for plundering the local population; perhaps the most prominent figures being Duke Albrecht von Wallenstein and Duke Mansfield. Another historical point of reference is the Chinese warlord era after the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1911. Due to the fragmentation of the Empire as well as the competition of local rulers and army commanders, about 1,300 warlords (in Chinese called junfa), subdivided in different cliques, were involved in more than 140 greater and smaller wars in the 1920s and 1930s. From a historical point of view, the figure of the warlord can thus be seen as the classical antagonist to the modern state's monopoly on the use of force, which was successively established in Europe and later elsewhere against various forms of warlordism.

In general, warlords are portrayed as profit-driven, economically motivated actors who have an interest in ongoing conflicts and, therefore, undermine peace and stability. As Max Weber (1978) pointed out, “The warlord becomes a permanent figure when there is a chronic state of war” (p. 1142). Moreover, warlords may also be present in a fragile postconflict setting or in situations of state failure. Under such circumstances, as demonstrated, for example, in Afghanistan after 2001 or in Bosnia after 1995, warlords and their private militias aim at consolidating the territorial, financial, or economic gains that they have made during a violent conflict. In other words, warlords may also exist outside of war times and may influence postwar economies and politics, in particular, as long as state structures are weak or failing and the state's monopoly of the use of force does not exist.

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