The Emergence and Significance of Warlordism in International Politics

Abstract

In recent years the concept of the ‘warlord’ has increasingly entered into popular political parlance. The word has been particularly popularized by the international media as a general term of explain the fissuring of nation states and the emergence of militarized sub-national groupings. Warlords increasingly appear to be a major feature of the post-Cold War international scene in which the writ of governments scarcely runs outside national capitals and the countryside has been rendered insecure through armed gangs and militias struggling for political and economic influence. Beleaguered state administrative machines in a number of different countries have been found incapable of containing threats to their authority from various clan, tribal and ethnic factions, while the legitimacy of national leaders is continually threatened by local and regional strong men. Some analysts such as Robert Kaplan have even gone as far as seeing the warlord as representing a menacing threat to the long-term security of the international order, which is dismally projected to take on many of the features that are to be found in some of the disintegrating states of Sub-Saharan Africa.¹