The Warlord Myth: A Tale of Wicked Men

In a first step, the warlord myth was analysed according to the ‘functions’ it contains. Propp defined functions as linguistic figures through which action is initiated: ‘Function is understood as an act of a character, defined from the point of view of its significance for the course of the action’ (Propp 1968: 7).

Functions are acts acted out by the tale’s dramatis personae. Consequently, as Propp says, the tale can be studied ‘according to the functions of its dramatis personae’ (Propp 1968: 8). The focus on func­tions is abstracting from the number and factual presentation of drama­tis personae who populate the myth: ‘one may say that the number of functions is extremely small, whereas the number of the personages is extremely large. This explains the two-fold quality of a tale: its amazing multiformity, picturesqueness, and color, and on the other hand, its no less striking uniformity, its repetition’ (Propp 1968: 8).

Propp consequently formulated three essential characteristics of fairy tales:

1. Functions of characters serve as stable, constant elements in a tale. Independent of how and by whom they are fulfilled. They constitute the fundamental components of a tale. 2. The number of functions known to the fairy tale is limited. [...] 3. The sequence of functions is always identical. (Propp 1968: 9)

All three make up the classification of a narrative as a fairy tale. Subsequent research has shown the same pattern stability for other kinds of tales, too (Dundes 1964; Holbek 1987; Foley 1990).

Propp’s analysis starts with the identification of an initial situation: the beginning point of all development in the tale. He then enumerates the various functions present in a sample of 100 fairy tales.

The uniformity of the functions and sequences in which they appear makes up a corpus of tales. As Levi-Strauss summarises Propp’s analysis:

The fairy tale can be defined as a development of which the starting point is a treason, the ending point a wedding, a treat, a deliverance or a relief, and the transition between the two happens through a series of intermedi­ary functions. (Levi-Strauss 1996 [1958]: 149, my translation from French)

Similarly, one can define the warlord myth corpus as a development of which the starting point is a fragmented society and political instability, commonly summarised as ‘failed state’, and the end point some kind of exploitative tyranny by a few. The transition is described through the rise of a man as military leader without any political or ideological programme, financed through shadowy economic activities (smuggling, corruption etc.). The rise of the leader might have been straightforward or encum­bered by competing warlords, and it might or might not have been sup­ported by external patrons (commonly with the distinction of ‘good’ and ‘murky’ patrons); the sequences can take on various colourings, but they will appear in the same order and describe the same overall development.

The former Under-Secretary General for Peacekeeping Operations and current CEO of the International Crisis Group, Jean-Marie Guehenno, tells a very short version of this tale:

Most conflicts in the world today [...] are civil wars and they are usually fought in the poorest countries, often where states have withered or collapsed.

The same sequencing has emerged inductively from an analysis of a small sample of 30 articles, which contained the word ‘warlord’ in their headlines and were published in major US news publications (New York Times, Washington Post etc.) between 2007 and 2012. The functions and sequences generated from this analysis allow describing the development of the warlord myth as illustrated in Fig. 7.3.

To check the general presence of these sequences in the media, a differ­ent sample of131 newspaper articles and nine US governmental documents from the same time period was then scrutinised with the aim of finding major digressions from the above narrative pattern. The analysis shows repetitively that there are no digressions of the warlord narrative pattern in the sample. Even though not every sequence regularly appears in the arti­cles (and this might well be for space reasons), the sequencing as such is always the same. It is noteworthy that function VI—‘redemption through international intervention’—and its sequence only appear in articles and texts after 2008, when the election of President Barack Obama made a US withdrawal from Afghanistan more likely. Sometimes, sequences are differentiated in variations such as the militia function, where description might vary on the type of militia (ethnic, religious, thugs and criminals, abducted children etc.). Such variations are purely concerned with the phenomenological appearance of the function but do not alter substan­tially the function itself; for instance, in all tales militias are irregular and extraordinarily brutal gunmen, regardless of whether they are tribal mili­tias or constituted by unemployed urban youth.

As already indicated above, the warlord myth is not restricted to media reporting but is equally narrated in scholarly literature.

Giustozzi and Ullah’s text shows, furthermore, how much the mythol­ogy of warlords is based on the stereotyping of particular forms of actions and persons. Just as in a folk tale, the sequences are largely contingent on the stereotyping of certain dramatis personae. While in a folk tale this is, for example, the stepmother (evil), the dwarf (vicious), the elderly woman (witch), the blond young girl (innocent), the white horse (carrying the

Initial situation: Failed state and anarchical society

Function I: Wicked men - Sequence I: A warlord seizes opportunities for personal power gain and enrichment and becomes a military leader.

Function II: Militia recruitment -Sequence II: In order to gain power the warlord mobilises ethnic, tribal or religious networks, recruits criminals and thugs, or abducts child soldiers (or all three).

Function III: Terror and protection racket -Sequence III: The warlord terrorizes civilians and selectively offers protection.

Function IV: Patronage - Sequence IV: The warlord has put in place an extended patronage network of organized crime (drugs, trafficking, diamonds etc.).

Function V: Exploitative tyranny -Sequence V: The warlord persists either through providing (selective) security or within continued chaos and anarchy.

Function VI: Redemption through international intervention - Sequence VI: International intervention transforms warlordism so that peace and stability emerge.

Fig. 7.3 Functions and sequences of the warlord myth. Source: Author

hero) etc., the mythology of warlords relies heavily on stereotypes of for­eign countries and ‘races’ (or ‘tribes’ or ‘ethnic groups’ or however these are then designated in the text)—concepts which the authors use without the least critique of their colonial and deterministic ontology.

This is unsurprising given that these stereotypes are derived from and justified by references to colonial anthropologists and social scientists, particularly in cases like Afghanistan. Keith Stanski shows in his discus­sion of the Afghan warlord metaphor that its contemporary use has a long pedigree going back to the first encounter of British colonisers with Afghanistan in the early nineteenth century (Stanski 2009). In a detailed discussion of the use of the metaphor by the Bush administration and in the media during operation Enduring Freedom, he is able to confirm the orientalist and manipulative character of the notion in the US political context. He also points out how Afghan actors themselves rejected the label of warlord, yet with little avail (Stanski 2009: 81).

These stereotypes have a specific place and use in the warlord mythol­ogy. They serve not only to define what and who a warlord is but also to

Table 7.1 Giustozzi and Ullah on warlords in Afghanistan

Source: Author

Note that this working paper was published in 2006 before function VI (‘redemption’) became an integral part of the warlord myth

classify his actions and to give specific, predetermined meaning to them. They hence stabilise the narrative and pattern the sequences. At the same time, they are evocative of the mirror myth, the underlying and subliminal myth about the stereotype’s ‘other’. The stereotypes of the syntagmatic narrative (in this case of the warlord myth) produce the paradigmatic nar­rative through contrasting images.