Warlords and Universal Sovereignty

Throughout history and across the globe, state leaders have attempted to deal with warlords: actors who control small slices of territory through a combination of force and patronage. Often warlords are middlemen, dealing on the one hand with corrupt state officials, while supported on the other by foreign states and other foreign actors who use them to gain hidden leverage inside weak states. What do the choices of state leaders in these situations tell us about the nuances of the concept of “sovereignty” at a domestic political level? While international relations scholars have challenged common prior understandings of sovereignty, their theories assume that limits on sovereignty are the result of conscious choices made by and between state leaders, rather than of state weakness and hidden foreign penetration. Comparative politics scholars of strongmen and state weakness have usually not recognized the hidden hand and intentions of foreign actors affecting how warlords deal with state leaders. This paper will explore how middlemen warlords define the limits of sovereignty in weak states, using examples from medieval Europe, the 20th-century Pakistani tribal areas, post-Soviet Georgia, and modern Iraq.