As the Soviet Union collapsed, conflicts broke out across its new periphery. The bloodier conflicts in the early 1990s, particularly in Georgia and Tajikistan, featured militias and elements of old security services under the command of surviving networks of elites and a variety of predatory warlords new to the scene. At stake were positions in these new countries’ administrations from which to seize state assets and loot other people’s property. Tajikistan’s conflict between 1992 and its official end in 1997 is conservatively estimated to have killed 40,000 to 50,000 people, while in Georgia, private armies in the capital fought against a backdrop of secessionist struggles. Disposable presidents, armed predators heading militias organized along clan lines, assassinations, kidnappings, and organized theft added to the picture of anarchy. Yet by the middle of the 1990s, remarkably stable political orders had emerged.

In this convincingly argued book, Jesse Driscoll seeks to make sense of this relatively sudden appearance of order. Moreover, Driscoll emphasizes that this rough postconflict political order “did not require many of the steps that are often presented by liberals as prerequisites to lasting peace” (p. 12). He seeks to explain why this happened, and to impress upon scholars and policymakers the extent to which the processes that brought it about were the products of local agency. Democracy, legitimacy, and the rule of law have little place in these outcomes. Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States should be read by all scholars, policy experts, and practitioners concerned with political violence and civil conflicts, both for the innovative ways that the author applies insights from more than two years of intense field research, and for the clear logic of his argument concerning major problems of creating political order in recent and ongoing conflicts.

The nonviolent equilibrium that emerged in Tajikistan and Georgia included intact militias and numerous potential “spoilers” who kept their original power bases. No foreign intervention rehabilitated state security forces or installed democratic institutions as a basis of lasting peace. Governance reform was a theatrical exercise. Real order was built on coalitions formed through bribery, and consolidated by presidents who became adept at divide-and-rule tactics and control over clients’ extractions of rents in an economy of patronage favors.

Driscoll frames the problem of generating political order in a model of coalition formation in which warlords and their followers have to bet on who has the best prospect of seizing the state. Militia foot soldiers think about the militia leaders who have reliable top-cover “roofs,” and thus would be in advantageous positions in the future as officials or insider businessmen who could use the services of their former fighters. Some members of the postindependence national elite succumb to the temptation to ally with warlords as insurance against getting cut out of the competition, and to be better positioned to play a role in a new coalition. A key claim at this point is that decisions about whether to join a coalition or stay on the sidelines “may have nothing to do with linguistic or religious difference, regional economic grievances, or anything else” (italics in original, p. 42). Driscoll knows his subjects well enough to recognize that individuals harbor all sorts of diverse reasons to join militias. But he observes too many instances of opportune side switching and hedging to accept, as many scholars of post-Soviet wars have, that politicized deep-rooted cleavages drove alignments.

The crux of the argument comes in defining who and what coordinates the scramble for the state. To capture the state, warlords needed a figurehead president as an interlocutor to other states, one who could use foreign policy to attract resources from abroad. Warlords kept their militias while they reinvented themselves as new political figures or went into “private” business in collusion with the state. Driscoll notes one key problem: “[I]t was the expectation of the strengthening of the state that led to the expansion and fragmentation of militias” (p. 92) as more capable institutions and more foreign aid increased the value of the prize being fought over. But warlords did not trust one another enough to congeal into a stable opposition force against the president, particularly once Russia’s government took a greater interest in supporting the incumbent. This situation leaves such a president in a position to take advantage of splits among the warlords. Divide-and-rule tactics become indispensable to the president to preserve and entrench the winning coalition. Warlord capitulation to this process produces mutual benefits: tamed warlords who find jobs for their followers. Militias in these contexts easily become patronage-based political parties or factions, and stronger presidents become indispensable to the well-being of their clients.

In Warlords and Coalition Politics we have a substantial contribution. There are elements of this argument that may travel to other places in the post-Soviet world. In other former Soviet Union states like Belarus, and in Russia itself, the consolidation of authority after the collapse of the Soviet Union involved competition among violent groups to seize state assets and offices in the state from which to control rents. Political order began to coalesce through the agency of a president who used similar divide-and-rule tactics to selectively co-opt or expel coalition members. The key insight is that “systemic corruption” (as critics would have it) is an integral component of state building through the harmonizing of violent predatory informal institutions with formal state structures.

If there are shortcomings in this thought-provoking and provocative book, they largely concern the central argument’s applicability outside the post-Soviet space. This region is atypical in global terms for the relative absence of contending foreign powers interested in using opposing armed groups in these countries’ civil wars as proxies to pursue political goals. Particularly in Tajikistan in the 1990s, the Americans and Russians shared an interest in Tajikistan’s political stability as a buffer against Islamist radicalism in Afghanistan. The more typical pattern in the past quarter century is an equilibrium of continued conflict, such as in Yemen, Afghanistan, and Somalia, in which there is no consolidation lottery. Warlords shift allegiances and play multiple sides simultaneously to hedge their bets. This is not to say that Driscoll is wrong about the potentials of coalitional bargaining in some sort of autonomous recovery to create political order. Indeed, the message from his book is that the impediment to political order lies in the interference of outsiders.

A related issue concerns why, even without foreign interference, warlords stick to bargains long enough to reach the threshold of a coalition that is large enough to capture the capital city and set up a “puppet” president who survives long enough to act as a credible gatekeeper when rivalries can so easily turn violent. Driscoll notes that even in the chaos of Russia’s own political situation in the 1990s, old military and intelligence ties remained, even if only at informal levels. Within that space, the promise of quick recognition of a coalition of warlords and a new president created a fait accompli that could be backed up with material and coercive resources in most instances. Self-fixing works, but it needs an extra push? By contrast, in places like Somalia, presidents continue to be more like paid actors by virtue of their international recognition, while on the ground they behave more like the heads of just another factional militia.

That said, none of these critiques detract from Driscoll’s powerful message. This book serves as a provocation to think more lucidly and comparatively about the real foundations of political order in other conflicts.