In his book, Jesse Driscoll argues that post-Soviet state formation amounted to a Darwinian competition among warlords, who fought, bested, and bargained with one another in a kind of “hunger games” of “war-making and state-making” (Charles Tilly, “War-making and State-making as Organized Crime,” in Peter B. Evans et al., eds., Bringing the State Back In, 1985). The fittest strongmen (and the foot soldiers who bet on them) coalesced around a fledgling civilian regime that could attract foreign support and provide subsequent opportunities for wealth creation and reinvention. Blending rich ethnographic fieldwork with formal modeling, Driscoll guides us through post-Soviet Georgia and Tajikistan to reveal larger truths about the relationships among political violence, criminality, and modern state building.

Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States is the latest in a rich tradition of scholarship that recognizes nonstate armed actors—often vilified as spoilers—as pivotal participants in the construction of political order. Students of state formation (e.g., see Mancur Olson, “Dictatorship, Democracy, and Development,” American Political Science Review 87 [September 1993]: 567–76; Karen Barkey, Bandits and Bureaucrats, 1994; Douglass North, John Wallis, and Barry Weingast, Violence and Social Orders, 2009) as well as students of modern conflict and intervention (e.g., see William Reno, Warlord Politics and African States, 1998; Zachariah Mampilly, Rebel Rulers, 2011; Dipali Mukhopadhyay, Warlords, Strongman Governors, and the State in Afghanistan, 2014) have drawn attention to the defining role that strongmen play in local and global “political marketplaces” (Alex de Waal, “Mission without End?” International Affairs 85 [2009]: 99–113; see also Ariel I. Ahram and Charles King, “Warlord as Arbitrageur,” Theory and Society [2012]: 169–86; Romain Malejacq, “Warlords, Intervention, and State Consolidation,” Security Studies 25 [2016]: 85–110).

Bandits, warlords, and rebel commanders have consistently recognized and seized upon the opportunities presented by the state-building project. Driscoll, like others before him, utilizes the warlord as a medium through which to investigate and theorize about the state in its more fragile manifestations. His evocative image of a “semipermeable state membrane” (p. 90) captures the absence of a clear demarcation between state and society, formal and informal institutions, the police and criminal elements, or statesmen and spoilers. He conveys the discomfiting reality that contemporary war making and state making remain intertwined: in the post-Soviet cases, in fact, “it was actually the expectations of a strengthening state that led to the expansion and fragmentation of militias,” because “the promise of future bilateral aid . . . increased the value of the prize being fought over” (p. 92).

Driscoll’s argument will undoubtedly unsettle enthusiastic interventionists. Aid and investment played a role in the political transformations of Georgia and Tajikistan, “not despite but because of the fact that these funds [could] be stolen by violence entrepreneurs” (p.12). Foreign powers prepared to back client warlords, regimes, or insurgents can shape developments on the battlefield, elite decision making, and coalition politics; the Russians exercised this influence in both cases (pp. 126–127). But, for Driscoll, warlords are the custodians of their countries’ political futures (p. 44). Readers with faith in the “international community” and its efforts at peace making, socioeconomic development, and liberal institution building—to “write a script to a better future” (p. 175)—will be confronted by an incisive argument that the interests of armed elites routinely exploit or trump the agendas of foreign “do-gooders.”

Driscoll persuasively demonstrates that state building is a ruthless game in which strongmen have no intention—or requirement—to disarm (p. 31); on the contrary, they navigate politics through the use of force. New regimes, once empowered, need not provide public goods and services to their citizens or embrace progressive politics through “democratization, legitimacy, or the rule of law” (p. 12). Instead, a ruler’s task is to manage the surrounding competition, “mapping the frictions between different coalitions, exploiting divisions to split his enemies, and acquiring a sense of timing and political theater” (p. 148). The author draws two masterful portraits (pp. 123–72) of what Joel Migdal called the “politics of survival” (Strong Societies and Weak States, 1988), bringing to life the transformations of “puppet presidents”—Georgia’s cosmopolitan statesman, Eduard Shevardnadze, and Tajikistan’s farmer-turned-ruler, Enomalii Rakhmonov—into secure sovereigns (p. 122).

The elegance of Driscoll’s argument, bolstered by vivid detail, makes for a convincing read; it also raises a number of new questions. The author proposes a calculus that leads armed men to throw in their lot with the state; but are financial (dis)incentives—foreign rents or war-fighting costs—always determinative? If the “cultural distance will be paved over” through “cold calculations of interest” (p. 43), how do we explain the commitment of ideological hardliners, whose fighting motivations appear to reside beyond the grasp of rational computation? In the case of those who do opt in, can the appeal of the foreign-aid “carrot” ever be strong enough to turn warlords into “good”’ governors—cultivating participatory politics, rights protection, and service delivery? Or will “managing [a] geopolitical narrative” (p.13), whatever that may mean, always suffice?

Driscoll’s calculus for civilian rulers, on the other hand, contends that “once in power, the president should always be able to buy off a coup” (p. 130); but can the ruler of a weak state ever afford to be so confident? In the “‘two-level games’” (p. 124) that these presidents play, they cannot control the domestic politics, national security policies, or economic ups and downs of their foreign patrons. As such, “foreign military support, economic aid, and diplomatic recognition” (p. 131) are fickle things, and the strategies of competition management for an aid-dependent regime remain beholden to their dynamism. The passage of time, then, can bring on exogenous shocks; it can also yield domestic changes.

Elections can be especially destabilizing to coalition politics in weak states, as they force allegiances and enmities into the open, thereby raising the stakes. And it is not just warlords who have power to threaten a regime. What about those who shaped post-Soviet politics but were not armed men? What did religious leaders, village elders, seasoned technocrats, public intellectuals, and ordinary citizens do? If Georgia is the “best Eurasian example” of a country to benefit from Western efforts at democratization (p.166), who was responsible for that transition, and how did their efforts intersect with the coalition politics at the heart of this book? It was, after all, “peaceful protests [that] swept Eduard Shevardnadze and his regime from power” (p. 168).

Finally, how might differences in the formal design of one state versus another (e.g., highly centralized versus federalized) impact the bargaining dynamics that drive coalition politics? How might changes within a single state over time shift the parameters of competition management? A single sovereign, like President Hamid Karzai in post-2001 Afghanistan, will use appointments and budgets to manage competition differently than the leaders of a “national unity” government (e.g., President Ashraf Ghani and CEO Abdullah Abdullah after 2014), who must negotiate and compromise with each another before they can manage those beyond the palace walls.

In addition to a number of questions provoked by this book, its exceptional readability and elegance bear note. Driscoll weaves a web effortlessly between rich ethnographic detail and formal modeling, and between dispassionately presented data and near-literary political analysis. Throughout, he faithfully reflects on his own position vis-à-vis the knowledge he creates. His approach affirms this reader’s belief that the methodological fault lines seemingly carving up the discipline can and must be traversed; in this sense, Warlords and Coalition Politics is a model of the syncretic value that mixed-methods research can produce. It is also an instructive and accessible companion to policymakers and practitioners working on issues of state fragility, political violence, counterinsurgency, and violent extremism in the former Soviet Union and beyond.