Empires of Mud

Empires of Mud Book Description

Warlords, namely charismatic military leaders who exploit the weakness of central authorities to size control of and autonomously rule a sub-national area, have earned much notoriety in recent years on account of the excesses of civil wars in Liberia, Somalia and Afghanistan. But notwithstanding their bad reputation, warlords have often participated in state formation. In Empires of Mud Guistozzi analyses the dynamics of warlordism in Afghanistan within the context of such debates. The lion’s share of the book consists of an in-depth analysis of the systems of rule – political, economic, military – which developed under Afghanistan’s two foremost warlords, Ismail Khan and Abdul Rashid Dostum, both of whom still weild considerable power even after the intervention of Allied Forces in Afghanistan in 2001. Their two systems are compred, highlighting convergences and divergences, in order to explain how warlords administer the areas that they control within so-called ‘failed states’, in the process challenging much of the received wisdom in scholarly and policy circles about warlordism. The author also discusses Ahmad Shah Massoud, whose ‘system’ incorporated elements of rule not dissimilar from that of the warlords.