In today's dominant discourse of liberal interventionism, the role of coercion and the monopoly of violence have been neglected, argues Antonio Giustozzi, an analyst justly renowned for his research and writing on the Taliban. It is widely assumed that a functional, liberal state can emerge out of a political settlement between warring parties based on political inclusiveness and a social contract, which involves pressuring political actors to reach a deal. But the post-Cold war experience of such deals has been so disappointing that a re-examination of these 'certainties' is warranted. Giustozzi contends that a key source of such flawed analyses is widespread confusion over what state formation and state-building involve. In his view, completely different 'rules of the game' apply to the two. Naked coercion is a key component of state formation, and very few states were formed without recourse to it. In contrast, the history of state consolidation after their initial formation is one of taming violence and creating increasingly sophisticated way of managing it. The Art of Coercion offers a new approach to thinking about the role of security forces, in their broadest sense, in this transition between state formation and state-building. While focussing largely on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Giustozzi discusses coercive power throughout history, from the Carolingian empire to the Boer War, from Zapata's Mexico to China's Warring States.  He scrutinises the role of armies, guerrilla bands, mercenaries, police forces and intelligence services, analyses why some coups fail and some succeed, and examines the ways in which the monopoly of violence decays.

Art of Coercion

Politics & Social Sciences

Antonio Giustozzi

Social Sciences

Hurst & Co.

While the 'New Taliban' looms large in the global media, little is known about how it functions as an organisation. How united is it? Are its structures relatively strong, or surprisingly brittle? Are personal relations and networking based on traditional ties of kin and ethnicity the sum total of its organisational capabilities, or are efforts underway to build more institutionalised chains of command? How united is the New Taliban, and how does it maintain whatever degree of unity it has, given the attrition it has suffered in the field? And to what extent is its leadership able to impose switches in strategy among the rank-and- file, given Afghanistan's difficult geography and poor communications? These are among the questions answered in this book by a renowned cast of practitioners, journalists and academics, all of whom have long field experience of the latest phase of the New Taliban's insurgency in Afghanistan. Decoding the New Taliban includes a number of detailed studies of specific regions or provinces, which for different reasons are especially significant for the Taliban and for understanding their expansion. Alongside these regional studies, the volume includes thematic analyses of negotiating with the Taliban, the Taliban's propaganda effort and its strategic vision.

Decoding the New Taliban: Insights from the Afghan Field

History

Asia

C. Hurst & Co. Publishers Ltd.

Koran, Kalashnikov and Laptop: The Neo-Taliban Insurgency in Afghanistan 2002-2007

Warlords, namely charismatic military leaders who exploit the weakness of central authorities to seize control of and autonomously rule a sub-national area, have earned much notoriety in recent years on account of the excesses of civil wars in liberia, somalia and afghanistan but notwithstanding their bad reputation, warlords have often participated in state formation in empires of mud giustozzi analyses the dynamics of warlordism in afghanistan within the context of such debates he approaches this complex task by first analysing aspects of the afghan environment that might have been conductive to the fragmentation of central authority and the emergence of warlords and then accounts for the emergence of warlordism in the 1980s and subsequently the lions share of this book consists of an in-depth analysis of the systems of rule - political, economic, military - which developed under afghanistans two foremost warlords, ismail khan and abdul rashid dostum, both of whom still wield considerable power even after the intervention of allied forces in afghanistan in 2001 their two systems are compared, highlighting convergences and divergences, in order to explain how warlords administer the areas that they control within so-called failed states, in the process challenging much of the received wisdom in scholarly and policy circles about warlordism the author also discusses ahmad shah massoud, whose system incorporated elements of rule not dissimilar from that of the warlords giustozzi concludes that although charismatic leaders play a key role in shaping the specific characteristics of each warlord polity, there are some common elements that underlie the emergence of warlordism

Empires of Mud: Wars and Warlords in Afghanistan

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Books by Antonio Giustozzi