Warlords, Inc. by Noah Raford

Author:Noah Raford [Raford, Noah]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-58394-902-3
Publisher: North Atlantic Books
Published: 2015-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

An Alternative Modernity?

The climate-changed and multiple-crisis-ridden world that is coming spells the breakdown of modernity as we have known it. What will follow? Other contributors to this book have noted the power that “deviant actors” can rapidly amass during and after crises. But the kinds of deviant actors they are referring to have two great advantages over the kind of progressive “deviant” political agents that we are hoping to see rally. First, warlord entrepreneurs and their ilk are on the path of least resistance—they go with the grain of the dominant materialism rather than against it. They encourage and profit from greedy, shortsighted consumerism. In a perverse paraphrase of the old song by the Police, in a world that’s running down, they make the best (for themselves) of what’s still around.

Second, these entrepreneurs seek to take advantage of systemic failures in order to further narrow agendas. They have no interest in contributing to repair, regeneration, and improvement of larger systems, at least not beyond the trade and finance networks they utilize. They prefer that larger systems remain weak, incapable of effectively monitoring or confronting the entrepreneurs’ operations, and amenable to covert manipulation through bribery and intimidation. Thus, in crisis environments, warlord entrepreneurs have distinct operational advantages over actors with broader agendas and ambitions, both existing authorities committed to stabilization of existing systems, and radicals and humanitarians who seek system transformation in the name of a just and viable future for their grandchildren and humanity at large. Warlord entrepreneurs can focus their attention, their muscle, their human capital, and their resources much more narrowly and be more forceful and persistent in their targeted involvements. Unlike humanitarians of all stripes, warlords do not need to inspire idealistic commitment from far-flung cadres and mass bases in order to leverage limited material resources in the mounting of broad campaigns that neither return any direct pecuniary profit to the central leadership nor motivate the cadre with the prospect of quick enrichment via capture of spoils. Of course, in the climate-changed world that is coming, ultimately, only those truly ready to live by the principle “après moi, le déluge” will be able to maintain such advantageous freedom of maneuver.

It is true, as the editor of this volume has said, that particularly successful warlord entrepreneurs may “become large and invested enough to seek to stabilize their position and consolidate their gains. In this condition, they shift from entrepreneur/exploitation mode to service provider/maintenance mode, in which they become subject to implicit and explicit agreements with their customers/subjects/constituents for continued support. Thus over time, they begin to assume the role of the state itself.”47 This is still happening—and will continue to happen—on a localized level, but comprehensive extension over larger territories will become increasingly rare. In the climate-changed and multiple-crisis-ridden world that is coming, larger projects will become difficult or impossible without idealistically inspired, committed cadres and mass bases. It will be increasingly difficult to make the shift from local dominance to larger system-consolidation (requiring, among other accomplishments, the

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