Warlord Politics and African States
William Reno
When rulers stop governing and run the state as a racket.
Reno analyzes how rulers in several weak or collapsing states, among them Liberia, Sierra Leone and the former Zaire, abandoned the project of governing and instead ran politics as a commercial enterprise, exchanging mineral concessions and violence for personal power. He presents warlord politics as a rational strategy amid state decay rather than as mere disorder. The book advanced the study of state collapse, shadow economies and the political economy of civil war, shaping later work on resource conflicts.
Its legacy. It shaped later scholarship on shadow states and resource wars.
- Author
- William Reno
- First published
- 1998
- Genre
- Political science
- Theme
- The Postcolonial State and Its Discontents
We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families
Next →Africa: Altered States, Ordinary Miracles
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