How do warlords survive and even thrive in contexts that are explicitly set up to undermine them? How do they rise after each fall? Warlord Survival answers these questions.
Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews and many months of fieldwork conducted in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2018, the book investigates how warlords survive and even thrive in contexts that are explicitly set up to undermine them.
Departing from dominant normative ways of looking at warlords, I show that these astute political entrepreneurs combine and convert different forms of power to adapt to new environments. They maintain authority despite massive state-building efforts, offering durable and flexible forms of power in unstable, violent environments.
Warlord Survival explains why external efforts aimed at building Western-like institutions are doomed to fail in fragmented, patronage-based societies, where personal relationships and patrimonial networks often trump institutional arrangements.
