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Illicit markets, violence, warlords, and governance: West African cases

Article in Crime Law and Social Change · September 2009

DOI: 10.1007/s10611-009-9199-8

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Crime Law Soc Change (2009) 52:313–322
DOI 10.1007/s10611-009-9199-8

Illicit markets, violence, warlords, and governance:

West African cases

William Reno

Published online: 5 March 2009

# Springer Science + Business Media B.V. 2009

Abstract It is commonly assumed that wartime leaders of illicit commercial

networks engage in exploitative behavior and lack popular support. Evidence from
West Africa suggests otherwise. Some wartime leaders use their commercial
activities in post-conflict situations to build political support among demobilized
fighters. Wartime leaders may then use these relationships to launch successful
electoral campaigns and to protect themselves from political marginalization or even
prosecution for their wartime activities. These developments represent the
emergence of new forms of governance outside the framework of imported notions
of reform and state-building.

Warlords are thought of as leaders of predatory armed groups that seek power for
their personal enrichment without regard for the broader interests of any significant
community. Liberia’s Charles Taylor is a classic example, and faced prosecution
before the Special Court for Sierra Leone for crimes against humanity that he
committed while the head of what the prosecution asserts was a crime syndicate that
traded in diamonds and arms. Yet many armed groups in West Africa’s conflicts that
attract the warlord label, while capable of creating considerable mayhem, also may
play key roles in promoting progressive political and economic changes. Some turn
out to have deep roots in local societies. Some emerge from conflicts to form new
political organizations that attract considerable popular support. This positive
societal reception of warlords also appears in places that have not experienced the
total breakdown of state authority. Nigeria is popularly thought of as one of the most
criminalized states in the world, and oil bunkering and armed groups in the Niger
Delta region are associated with predatory violence. But some of the people who
organize these activities declare that they are advancing community agendas and a
lot of people there accept these claims.

W. Reno (*)
Department of Political Science, Northwestern University, Chicago, IL, USA
e-mail: reno@northwestern.edu
314 W. Reno

Popular criminals?

The standard approach is to view West Africa’s recent conflicts as prototypes of “new
wars” that involve struggles to control resources. These are wars that are fought to
serve the self-interest of rebel commanders and militia leaders to the detriment of any
ideological program or broader community interests [1]. An influential commentator
applied this view to West Africa when he described combatants as fighting about
nothing much beyond insuring their own survival [2]. Scholars have developed this
analysis further through focusing on the individual motivations of fighters. These
scholars identify fighters’ personal interests in seizing lootable goods and gaining
more status or power over other people as prime determinants of the particularly
predatory behavior that characterizes West Africa’s recent wars. Illicit commerce
plays an important role in satisfying these interests. Activities such as digging
diamonds with forced labor and selling the stones to buy more guns, or the
transshipment of drugs sustains the rebel groups and rogue units of national armies
while they perpetrate violence against their own communities. Thus the main impact
of illicit commerce in these wars is to become a focus of violence as part of a
socially destructive process that disrupts basic order and impoverishes that majority
of people in these societies [3].
The destructive role of illicit markets is particularly evident in Sierra Leone’s
1991–2002 war involving fighters from within the country and the intervention of
other forces from Liberia. The capture of diamond mining areas and control over the
diamond trade appeared to weigh heavily in the strategies of all of the contending
armed groups in Sierra Leone and Liberia, whether they were affiliated with rebels
or governments. A commander of a Nigerian-led international intervention force
reported, for example, that units of the national army were “deeply involved in
illegal mining of diamond.” Even Nigerian soldiers joined in: “Our boys forgot our
main mission in Sierra Leone and opted instead for material gains… the allure of
having a few gem stones in their pockets was too tempting” [4]
Michael Ross provides a convincing explanation for why illicit commerce,
particularly when it involves portable high value resources that are concentrated in
fairly compact geographical zones, shapes the motivations of parties to conflicts and
prolongs fighting. He observes how sales of these resources or even the sale of the
promise to partners of the fruits of joint exploitation once a site is captured, or
“booty futures”, can finance the start-up costs of rebel groups. Some rebel groups
succeed in attracting foreign businesses, particularly of the shadier sort that team up
with rebel to get access to mine sites or other opportunities that are inaccessible to
their more conventional commercial rivals. Partnerships of this kind provide
otherwise unviable rebel groups with early income to finance arms purchases and
recruitment and then go on to capture resources for joint exploitation. This dynamic
also prompts leaders of threatened regimes to use violence to preempt these
challenges. The overall effect of these incentives and strategies is to make wars more
likely, more violent and to prolong their duration [5].
The conflict in the 1990s in Sierra Leone and Liberia fit well with the analyses
that Ross and others developed. These analyses also shaped how foreign diplomats
and others dealt with the consequences of conflict, and in particular led them to
connect illicit commerce with criminal activities. For example, the Special Court for
Illicit markets, violence, warlords, and governance 315

Sierra Leone’s indictment of leaders of the Armed Forces Revolutionary Council,

composed partly of renegade units of the national army, described this group as
having “shared a common plan, purpose or design (joint criminal enterprise) which
was to take any actions necessary to gain and exercise political power and control
over the territory of Sierra Leone, in particular the diamond mining areas,” and cited
their promise to provide these resources to outsiders “in return for assistance in
carrying out the joint criminal enterprise” [6].
This standard explanation of the connection between violence and illicit
commerce illuminates some basic truths about these conflicts but it does not tell
the whole story. In particular, it is hard to account for why some of these wartime
leaders and their associates, predatory and self-interested though they may be,
exercise a hold on the imaginations and affections of other people who are not direct
beneficiaries of loot or longer-term business operations. For example, Jewel
Howard-Taylor, the former wife of the warlord Charles Taylor, gained enough
support in 2005 to win a seat in the Liberian Senate in an election that international
observers declared was an unbiased reflection of people’s preferences. She also is
known in her home community as the daughter of a powerful local leader and has
taken an important role in women’s welfare and economic development activities.
Even though her association with Charles Taylor was widely known, she still
cultivated a base of popular support. Prince Yormie Johnson also is a Senator and
ranks as a popular politician despite his role as a faction leader during that country’s
war. A Human Rights Watch report accused Johnson of sharing in responsibility for
a “human rights disaster” that drove a fifth of the country’s population to other
countries and that posed a “risk of genocide” for the country’s Krahn ethnic group
[7]. An analyst wrote of Adolphus “General Peanut Butter” Dolo, another member
of Liberia’s Senate, that he “is a former pro-Taylor militia leader, known by the nom
de guerre General Peanut Butter, who reportedly committed war-time atrocities and
recruited child fighters, and who is said to have aggressively opposed UNMIL
peacekeeping activities” [8]. Dolo went on to organize one of the country’s largest
business syndicates and helped to turn his home town into an important center for
trade with Côte d’Ivoire and one of the country’s most dynamic economic zones.
This is not to deny that these and others who were called warlords were involved
in illicit commercial activities and abused human rights. Evidence shows, however, a
reality of power in these conflicts. That is, these people acquired their positions
because they had built bases of popular support because of their wartime actions,
regardless of whether outsiders (and quite a few local people) considered these
actions to be criminal. But other factors shape people’s judgments about wartime
notables. Referring to Liberia, United Nations officials report that “in the absence of
other employment alternatives, mining camps attract young males, often ex-
combatants, at times maintaining their former command structures” [9]. Nigeria’s
Delta region exhibits similar sorts of social acceptance of some violent enterprises.
In a survey of militia members, for example, a majority reported finishing secondary
school—in a country where about 20% get the opportunity to attend secondary
school—and stated that they saw militia activities including the theft of oil and
extortion from oil companies as a form of employment [10]. These activities support
some local politicians who buy the services of armed youth through the so-called
security vote. This is an allocation intended for “maintaining peace and security” in
316 W. Reno

Nigeria’s Local Government Areas, but “it is often alleged that security vote money
is actually used by many chairs to carry out political violence on their behalf” and to
build their own fortunes [11]. In Côte d’Ivoire, youth militias pose as defenders of
“tradition.” In fact, they are anything but defenders of customary practices as they
target outsiders and contribute to the enterprises of their patrons. In southern parts of
the country, “strangers (northerners, Burkinabé, but also Baoulé [whose ancestors
resided in the south]) are chased off their land, which subsequently is seized ‘legally’
by local big men” [12].
A more accurate picture of the political economies that develop in the post-war
dispensations in these countries requires focusing on how wartime leaders and their
fighters refashion their connections to one another. Many of these networks survive
the end of fighting. They often lend themselves to a particularly illiberal brand of
politics that is focused on the defense of narrow ethnic interests and the violent
pursuit of commercial gain. In this respect, these networks resemble the “criminal
enterprises” that the Special Court for Sierra Leone described in that country. The
crucial difference, however, lies in the fact that these networks attract considerably
more popular support than a socially marginalized gang of criminals would be
expected to garner.
In fact, many who build postwar political careers and commercial empires emerge
out of wartime leadership positions. They mobilize their wartime associates to make
the transition to peacetime politician and business leader. They often win elections
with claims that they are protecting a particular ethnic community or kinship group
from menace from other citizens. This can reinforce existing ethnic or sectarian
divisions and even create new ones. They point out that their businesses, whether
they are legal or clandestine, employ local people. This kind of postwar politics
points to the rapid social change that follows wars and that is usually ignored in the
game theoretic and statistical explanations of the causes and outcomes of violent
conflict and associated illicit markets. This politics often seems to signal a lapse to
divisive “tradition,” but it really is more about promoting the fortunes of a new
business and a new political class that appears as wartime leaders convert their status
and wealth into peacetime activities. Moreover, as the outcomes from Liberia’s
elections noted above show, this transition can occur amidst massive international
engagement and even against threats of prosecution for wartime crimes as foreigners
try to shape developments to their liking.
These postwar transitions actually are more common than optimistic international
organization officials and local reformers may think. At first glance, the development
of “big men” politicians in West Africa’s postwar settings appears to replicate prewar
patronage politics. But the change is deeper. Contemporary postwar politics in West
Africa forces these “big men” to rely more exclusively on local supporters to play a
role in national politics and in the economy. In contrast, most prewar “big men” in
West Africa could depend upon the favor of corrupt presidents to gain access to wealth
and power. International support for reconstruction efforts, however, subjects national
leaders at the highest levels to intense scrutiny. This truncation of patronage networks
still leaves these businessmen–politicians with ties to local people that are beyond the
reformers’ reach. Local politicians now have more leeway (or perhaps compulsion) to
assert populist claims against postwar national leaders. This independent local base of
support also may give these politicians greater freedom to turn their wartime
Illicit markets, violence, warlords, and governance 317

connections to the pursuit of business and to build coalitions of followers without

having to take into account the priorities of the president. Ironically, those who were
branded as criminals during wars may actually play some role in creating conditions
that lead to political systems in which business entrepreneurs and local communities
can successfully assert their interests against those of the state. While not a sufficient
condition for democracy, this may be a necessary condition.
My claim that wartime serial violators of human rights and illicit economy
entrepreneurs may play a role in progressive outcomes should not be taken as an
absolute statement. Some armed groups that combined warfare and business meet
decisive rejection among citizens. Most of Sierra Leone’s RUF commanders sank
into obscurity after that country’s war ended in 2001. The standard bearer of the
RUF’s political party in 2002 attracted only 1.7% of votes cast, a figure that
indicates that even many former RUF fighters would not even vote for him [13].
Many Liberian wartime figures who stood for election in 2005 failed miserably
when people were given the opportunity to reject them. In Nigeria’s Delta region,
armed groups, including ones that are quite violent toward non-combatants, appear
to garner local support while others are reviled as bandits. This variation is even
more significant for the fact that “criminal enterprises” whose leaders gain popular
support and those that do not share seemingly high levels of self-interest and
willingness to employ violence to achieve their goals. What accounts for this
difference in levels of popular support of even the most predatory and violent armed
groups in wartime and peacetime? A start at an answer to this question, which
provides the subject for the next section, sheds more light on how this process of
indigenous transition (as opposed to internationally scripted transitions) unfolds in
West Africa’s postwar politics.

Violence, illicit commerce and state-building

For scholars of warfare who look beyond West Africa and back through history, wars
and the violent commercial activities related to them, including Ross’s “booty
futures”, strike some as integral to the process of building states. Charles Tilly’s
classic formulation of state-building as a form of organized crime makes an explicit
connection between violence, the sale of protection, and the generation of revenues
that the war leaders in Europe since the beginning of the second millennium AD
need to pay for their military campaigns [14]. Mancur Olson is even more explicit in
connecting in his analysis people that he calls warlords, violence, and the creation of
new political communities in his examples from the Chinese warlord period of the
1920s [15].
West Africa’s wars and the illicit economies associated with them are not
repetitions of experience in Europe of several centuries ago or of China’s warlord
period at the start of the twentieth century. If one delves deeper into the political
economy of illicit transactions in West Africa’s wars, one finds multinational
business partners and war fighting technologies that had no clear equivalents in the
earlier cases. But other aspects of West Africa’s war do bear more than passing
resemblances to earlier experience in demonstrating a connection between violent
accumulation of wealth, violent political struggle and what in hindsight appears as
318 W. Reno

progressive social change. England’s Henry VIII, for example, plundered Catholic
Church assets, which prior to their seizure in the 1530s generated incomes that were
ten times greater than the Crown’s income and accounted for about a third of the
total value of land values in England at the time. Henry VIII then “privatized” these
lands and their incomes to his henchmen in return for their help to invade France and
control his own country’s population and ultimately to build an effective state and a
strong class of entrepreneurs who could contribute to the Industrial Revolution that
would get underway several generations later [16]. King Henry’s strategy finds
resonance in the decisions of presidents in Ghana, Sierra Leone and Nigeria between
1968 and 1973 to “Africanize” foreign-owned enterprises, the assets of which were
promptly distributed to political allies and supporters, some of whom later became
warlords. European statecraft in more recent times also included activities that are
now widely recognized as criminal. Janice Thomson points out that privateers—
pirates—were instruments of state strategies to accumulate resources, influence
global trade relations, find work for armed experts in violence, and harm the fortunes
of rival states [17].
Politics in West Africa stretching back at least to the nineteenth century exhibit
some of the combinations of violence and resource exploitation that contemporary
global norms label as illicit. Contemporary Niger Delta society lauds as a nationalist
hero the nineteenth century’s Jaja of Opobo. He was a son of a slave who rose to
prominence through mobilizing armed young men to help him monopolize the trade
in palm oil as a step to taking over regional patronage networks. Much like warlords
of the 1990s, he built a base of support that merged his personal control over
economic transactions with foreigners, the import of weapons, and political
domination based on the regular exercise of violence. Like many of the key figures
in Africa’s recent wars, it is difficult to categorize Ja Ja of Opobo primarily as
a businessman, a politician, an administrator, or a leader in local customary
institutions, as he was a prominent figure in all of these endeavors. Were global
affairs organized then as they are today, no doubt he would also have run a
major “indigenous” NGO that would serve as another conduit for channeling
resources into patronage networks and warfare. Taking a broader perspective,
Basil Davidson described this man in positive terms from the point of view of
economic progress. “Men such as King Ja Ja of Opobo, who now soared to
commercial power on the export of palm oil, began to introduce the rise of a
capital-owning and -investing group that might have hope, given time, of
becoming a middle class of national builders in the European sense of the term.
But they were not given time” [18]. It would shock many to direct such praise
toward Liberia’s or Nigeria’s current crop of violent entrepreneurs. Nonetheless,
recognition of the reality of popular support and of pockets of commercial viability
indicate that realistic and unsentimental analyses of postwar political economies
ought to take seriously the possibility that at least some of these people are
promoting positive social change.
These developments challenge the contemporary view of wars in Africa,
especially of “new wars” since 1990, that their record is entirely destructive. It is
true that fighters kill and maim civilians, destroy infrastructure, provoke the collapse
of social services and force large numbers of people have to flee their homes. Most
accounts of wars in West Africa also recognize that some people manage to become
Illicit markets, violence, warlords, and governance 319

wealthier as a consequence of war, although these people are condemned as

predators who fuel conflicts [19]. The analysis in this essay does not challenge this
assessment. The analysis, however, considers what happens when some of these
predatory individuals shift into the realm of peaceful economic competition. Similar
transitions preoccupied the scholars noted above and many others who have studied
the development of states and the growth of businesses through history. How to
connect that analysis and some contrary observations from West Africa offers a
fruitful avenue for further inquiry and ought to be of great interest to those who hope
for change in West Africa. The caveat, however, is that the change that is occurring
may not be the change that all desire.
The political economies of West African wars, warfare produces economic and
social changes that contain some elements associated with what used to be called
“modernization.” As the examples from Liberia at the start of this essay showed,
these wars accelerate the migration of rural people to urban centers. If not the
enclosures of pre-industrial Scotland or England, these wars drive people off the land
and advance the claims of others. Groups of ex-combatants who settle on resource-
rich lands in Liberia, Sierra Leone and Côte d’Ivoire have begun to make claims that
sound like they are defending what they regard as their private property. They
receive backing to make these claims from their political patrons, some of whom
also were their wartime commanders. While the benefits from these conflicts over
land often accrue to the people at the top of the political and economic hierarchy,
the people who support them may, as a consequence of their experiences in war,
have fewer attachments to old collectivist institutions. Their ties to customs and
obligations are loosened, allowing them to focus more exclusively on commerce
and advancing their own economic interests.
It should not be surprising that the political economies of war and postwar
transitions in West Africa promote substantial social changes, as do wars in other places.
But this image of war as “progressive” (in the sense of promoting individualism,
loosening communal obligations and elevating the importance of commerce in everyday
life) does not fit with most international organizations’ and relief agencies’ images of
postwar reconstruction as a restoration of prewar society. In Sierra Leone’s diamond
mining district, youth assert what they consider to be their personal rights to
dispose of real property at the expense of older practices that subject property to
the dictates and interests of “customary authorities” that many view as corrupt
[20]. From this perspective, it is a mistake to endorse the international community’s
decision to restore the Paramount Chief system of local administration in Sierra
Leone or to endorse the demands of communities of “indigenes” in Côte d’Ivoire
who want to restore their customary rights to land. Would “restoration” be at the
expense of future economic efficiency and political stability? In the 1950s, youth
opposition to Sierra Leone’s form of local governance generated considerable
violence. But the risk-averse retreating British colonial authorities decided that
caving in to their demands would promote “radical revolution”. Rural oppression
thus became a constant backdrop to prewar Sierra Leone politics.
How do the social changes that follow West Africa’s wars play out in the context
of the postwar construction of national institutions? One danger is that rebuilding old
state institutions will create vehicles for the recentralization of patronage politics.
Patronage alongside partially effective state institutions helped national leaders to
320 W. Reno

centralize parallel patronage networks so that resources flowed upward, as local “big
men” owed their positions more to the favor of presidents than to their capacities to
help local people in their daily struggles to survive. This gave presidential clients
license to exploit people without suffering the negative consequences of their
resulting unpopularity. These predations also were bad for local economies, as
politicians had little incentive to limit their predations. A more decentralized system
of patronage, while presenting the danger that lower-level patrons might remobilize
followers to go back to war, also leaves these local bosses in positions where they
have to take more seriously the interests and aspirations of their followers if they are
to retain their positions. Again, while this is not necessarily a recipe for democracy,
and may even promote ethnic chauvinism, it is more compatible with developing
reciprocities in follower–leader relations. Reciprocal attention to the interests of
followers and their patrons is a basic feature of successful state-building, and as Tilly
noted [above], usually involved incorporating commerce into this relationship.
If one believes that patron–client politics is an integral and lasting element of
West African societies, the promise of the line of analysis here is that such social
organizations may be compatible with building reasonably accountable states after
undergoing changes as a consequence of warfare. Moreover, the international
community’s insistence that postwar aid will be tied to a doctrine of economic and
political development through the adoption of twenty-first century norms for
governing markets and politics draws on very few historical examples of sustained
state-building on this basis. Alongside that record stands Alice Amsden’s general
observation that the strategies and conduct of warfare reshapes and often hastens
ongoing changes in social relations, such as weakening the authority of old elite
groups and in promoting the social acceptance of new values in personal behavior in
ways that often produce unexpected payoffs in terms of economic growth and
efficiency in later years [21].
This is not to say that warfare is great for West Africa. This is evident in the
experiences of people who live through wars. While pressed into service in wartime
Sierra Leone as an impromptu translator for a frontline medical team, this author was
able to discuss with a local person who was fleeing a rebel attacks the views of an
American academic who wrote that Africa’s states were put together wrong, with the
implication that a bit of rearranging, by violence if necessary, should not be
dismissed out of hand. The interlocutor responded that this idea was immoral and
asked how could I tell a man whose daughter had just been raped, or a mother whose
son had been kidnapped to fight with rebels that this was all part of a process that a
few generations from now would make Sierra Leone more like France [22]. But in
the cases noted above, war happened, and criminalized networks, or more properly,
illicit, as “criminalized” presupposes the congruence of popular legitimacy and state
regulation, played a major role in them and shaped subsequent social changes.
The observations in this essay are meant to draw attention to the social changes
that warfare has produced and to think about how they might contribute to more
efficient local exploitation of economic opportunities or the maintenance of more
stable political arrangements. Many of the leaders of wartime violent activities have
connections to state officials and local notables and to common people. War can
change how these relationships work in ways that produce unexpected and novel
outcomes. Saying that wartime nouveau riche or even the old-time rich who get
Illicit markets, violence, warlords, and governance 321

richer in wartime in Africa might have roles to play in sustained economic

development is like saying that some socialist cadres in the Soviet Union had the
connections and expertise to accumulate large fortunes and link their old socialist
economy to global commerce. In fact these people since the early 1990s have played
major roles in Russia’s miseries and in its rapid economic growth. Surely these
people did not join the Communist Party because they thought that this was a direct
route to membership in the global business elite. But the realignment of economic
and social forces that the disruptive equivalent of war provided in that case produced
this unintended result as the more enterprising among these people seized
opportunities to get rich. Crisis-generated change was not all bad for Russia,
whatever one might think of Vladimir Putin or his style of politics.
Unexpected outcomes abound in postwar situations. Looking to Ethiopia, one
finds a ruling party that began as an insurgency that was organized along strict
Marxist–Leninist lines to resist pressures from their Soviet-backed enemies. Their
aim was to build socialism in Africa, not to become guardians of capitalist
prosperity. Yet this party now plays an important role in organizing this oil-poor
country’s rapidly growing economy that registered a 10.7% annual growth rate
between 2002 and 2006 by IMF reckoning [23]. Some officials in Ethiopia attribute
this success to their reliance on party-based political networks to strategically deploy
investment from China and the Persian Gulf to build infrastructure and develop
export markets. This was hardly an intended consequence of a bitter war from the
early 1970s to 1991, although warfare turned out to be decisive in shaping Ethiopia’s
postwar political economy.
Perhaps war in parts of Africa will force influential people there to abandon the
ineffective diversionary strategies that privileged stability and incremental change
that they inherited from colonial administrations and then modified for their own
purposes. For example, Ricardo Soares de Oliveira notes the capacity of Angola’s
oligarchs to sustain technocratic expertise and economic efficiency where it counts
[24]. Moreover, that country’s capacity to keep the World Bank and IMF at bay
enables its rulers to experiment with development models that produce impressive
levels of growth and economic diversification, in spite of its tendencies to reinforce
hideous inequality. To what extent does the tendency of those who do intervene
with the remit of the international community to see war as an interruption rather
than a force of change instead provide incentives to forestall or avoid important
developments?

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