Not all violence entrepreneurs and not all violent militaries qualify as war­lords, and not all situations of collective violence are labelled warlordism. In fact, the analysis of warlordism is relatively recent.

What is so particular about warlords and warlordism that they constitute a narrative of their own? Drawing on the analysis of myth as proposed by Levi-Strauss (see Chap. 5), I will argue that the warlord narrative can be considered a mod­ern myth of the international system.

The warlord myth also tells a tale of ungovernable territories and peo­ples. It, consequently, offers a justification of international intervention

and, at the same time, an excuse for the failure of external peacemaking in these ‘ungovernable’ regions by putting the blame entirely on the recipi­ents of the peacemaking efforts. The warlord myth deflects critical ques­tions that could be asked about interference and intervention, about the state of the state in the world, and about structural weaknesses and failures of the Western state model due to global policies and specific foreign poli­tics before and during the external peacemaking efforts.

The warlord/state myth represents warlordism as a dire reality of the contemporary world by contrasting wicked individuals to orderly states in such a stereotyped manner that other possible explanations of political vio­lence are a priori excluded.

In his discussion of myths, Levi-Strauss uses the example of an Amerindian myth about a skate, who convinces the south wind to blow only every other day and not every day. Levi-Strauss dismisses that this is an absurd and unreasonable story, and claims that, contrary to ridiculing such myths, the analyst needs to reflect on the implicit and culturally framed meanings of the dramatis personae and their actions in the myth (Levi- Strauss 1996 [1958]). The analyst has to ask ‘Why the skate and why the south wind?’. Both represent something that is well inscribed into the cul­tural landscape of the audience and makes sense to them; the analysis of the myth has to unveil this sense. In the same vein, this chapter’s analysis has to ask ‘Why the warlords and why the state?’ In looking for answers, the analysis has to turn towards the question of why ‘we’, that is, the West that produces these narratives, tell this tale of warlords and states. Which is the cultural horizon on which the images of warlords and states are painted?

It is not sufficient to declare the rhetoric of warlords a strategic dis­course of policymakers, academics, or militaries, which would be hiding other, real motives. Although the strategic use of this narrative is certainly an important factor to explain its persistence, it can neither explain its emergence nor its particular structure. Both its emergence and particu­lar structure are determined by a priori defined meanings and contexts.

According to Levi-Strauss’s structural analysis of myths, myths have to be read in three ways. First, the apparent content has to be analysed in order to capture the significance of the dramatis personae (which he calls ‘function’, following Propp, see Chap. 5) and the action of the myth (sequences) (Propp 1968). Second, every function and sequence has an ‘other’—positive or negative connotations which are often implic­itly, but sometimes also explicitly, presented in the apparent myth. Third, the underlying, implicit and tacitly understood narrative, which results from the interplay between the syntagmatic (explicit) and paradigmatic (implicit) narrative, has to be identified and recontextualised within the text and within the understanding of the myth’s audience (Levi-Strauss 1955, 1979, 1987, 1996 [1958]). This structural analysis takes the sequen­tial analysis of the folk tale analyst Propp further: ‘Levi-Strauss’ position is essentially that linear sequential structure is apparent or manifest con­tent, whereas the paradigmatic or schematic structure is the more impor­tant latent content’ (Dundes 1968: 2). At the same time, Levi-Strauss distinguishes himself from purely interpretative approaches (for instance, psychoanalytical approaches) as he argues that the myth’s latent mean­ing cannot be interpreted through hermeneutics but has to be deduced strictly and systematically from its apparent content and cannot be freely interpreted (Levi-Strauss 1955: 429).

In this chapter, the warlord myth will be analysed using these basic principles. In a first step, I will identify the functions and sequences of the warlord myth.

A Short Word on Methodology

In analysing the mythology of warlords, the research for this chapter has gone forth and back between different corpuses of literature. For an explorative investigation of the warlord myth pattern, two distinct samples of newspaper articles published between 2007 and 2012 in US newspa­pers have been analysed. For a deeper analysis of the warlord and the state myth, a series of scholarly articles and books have been explored using

Fig. 7.1 Publications with ‘warlord’ in the title, keywords or abstract per year (Scopus count). Source: Author

computer-assisted discourse analysis (NVivo). The focus on English texts derives from the observation that most writing on warlords, whether in newspapers or in scholarly literature, has appeared in the United States and in the United Kingdom, and mostly after the US invasion of Afghanistan (see Figs. 7.1 and 7.2).

Fig. 7.2 Publications with ‘warlord’ in the title, keywords or abstract per coun­try (Scopus count)¹. Source: Author

In terms of scholarly literature, a smaller sample of eleven journal arti­cles and research working papers were selected on the basis of an initial content analysis. From these a further selection was made for an in-depth analysis, which is presented in this chapter. The selection of texts was not based on a stochastic model but resulted from an intensive reading of these texts and a selection on how much they qualitatively represented the functions and sequences of the warlord and state myths. All inves­tigated texts followed the patterns described below. Those presented in more detail here, however, do so in a particularly clear manner, which makes them ideal-typical objects for a discussion of the mythologisation processes of warlordism and statism.