?
Warlord Survival: The Delusion of State Building in Afghanistan: by Romain Malejacq, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2020, 247 pp., $39.95 (hardcover), ISBN 1501746421
This book is a valuable resource for researchers and authors because it contains numerous interviews with Afghan political and social figures, including warlords. Malejacq includes photographs, and the extensive literature review shows the book’s deep level of academic engagement. The book argues that Afghanistan’s warlords are going to be a permanent feature of the country’s politics, because they have enough power to resist centralizing pressure and secure their own political survival. It reviews the appearance of warlords in Afghanistan in the context of the instability and warfare that have gripped the country since the overthrow of the monarchy. The book, which is based on comprehensive research on Afghan society, politics and economics, shows how the state’s and the warlords’ power waxes and wanes in an inverse relationship: the stronger the state, the weaker the warlords, and vice versa. This view finds support in the history of the country. The book has strong policy implications: the U.S. military withdrawal will likely create a security vacuum and lead to the re-empowerment of the warlords. The book also contributes to state-building theory. The author argues that the international community’s view of Afghanistan as a Weberian or Westphalian state is an assumption grounded in legal fiction rather than political reality. As a result, state-building policies founded on that assumption are bound to fail. Together with the Westphalian model, the author also rejects traditional realist approaches, opting instead for social constructivism as a way of explaining warlordism in Afghanistan. The warlords are constrained by the international system, or the distribution of power within it, and thus fall outside realism’s explanatory abilities. Further, Malejacq argues that the warlords impact the international system directly, because they challenge the state and its norms to the point of altering it to suit their interests. Perhaps this point, which flies in the face of the idea of international law and of the legitimacy of the state, is too broad to be proven by a single set of countryspecific individual case studies, and would likely need further exploration