How do warlords survive and even thrive in contexts that are explicitly set up to undermine them? How do they rise after each fall? Warlord Survival answers these questions. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews in Afghanistan between 2007 and 2018, with ministers, governors, a former vice-president, warlords and their entourages, opposition leaders, diplomats, NGO workers, and local journalists and researchers, Romain Malejacq provides a full investigation of how warlords adapt and explains why weak states like Afghanistan allow it to happen.

Malejacq follows the careers of four warlords in Herat, Sheberghan, and Panjshir—Ismail Khan, Abdul Rashid Dostum, Ahmad Shah Massoud, and Mohammad Qasim Fahim). He shows how they have successfully negotiated complicated political environments to survive ever since the beginning of the Soviet-Afghan war. The picture he paints in Warlord Survival is one of astute political entrepreneurs with a proven ability to organize violence. Warlords exert authority through a process in which they combine, instrumentalize, and convert different forms of power to prevent the emergence of a strong, centralized state. But, as Malejacq shows, the personal relationships and networks fundamental to the authority of Ismail Khan, Dostum, Massoud, and Fahim are not necessarily contrary to bureaucratic state authority. In fact, these four warlords, and others like them, offer durable and flexible forms of power in unstable, violent countries.

Romain Malejacq is Assistant Professor at the Centre for International Conflict Analysis & Management at Radboud University Nijmegen. Follow him on X @afghanopoly.

Malejacq's book impressively illustrates in meticulous detail how understanding warlords as limited to organising violence is a gross mis-representation of their skills and political adaptive potential.

Malejacq gives us an extensive, in-depth vision of the political agency of warlords and how they manage to maintain their political authority even in highly challenging (geo)political scenarios. He brings an important and well-grounded interrogation to Western interventionist models of state-building. Moreover, his book has the potential of opening-up the readers' imagination to alternative constructions of political orders and broader perspectives on 'international actors', given his presentation of warlords' skilful diplomacies and strategies towards international politics.

William Maley, Australian National University, author of Transition in Afghanistan:

Romain Malejacq has written an excellent study of considerable importance, sophisticated and accessible. It significantly advances our understanding of the problems that international actors have encountered in trying to promote new political structures in Afghanistan since 2001.

Jesse Driscoll, University of California, San Diego, author of Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States:

Warlord Survival is given heft by the richness of the data, the care with which the data has been curated, and the way in which it has been combined with potent sociological insights. This book will acquire a cherished place on the bookshelves of security and development professionals.