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The Paradox of “Warlord” Democracy: A Theoretical Investigation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 February 2004

WANTCHEKON LEONARD
WANTCHEKON LEONARD
Affiliation:
New York University
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Abstract

Political theorists from Machiavelli to Huntington have denied the possibility of popular government arising out of the chaos of civil war, instead prescribing an intermediate stage of one-man rule by a Prince, Leviathan, or a military dictator. Based on recent empirical evidence of post-civil war democratization in El Salvador, Mozambique, and elsewhere, I show that democracy can arise directly from anarchy. Predatory warring factions choose the citizenry and democratic procedures over a Leviathan when (1) their economic interests depend on productive investment by the citizens, (2) citizens' political preferences ensure that power allocation will be less biased under democracy than under a Leviathan, and (3) there is an external agency (e.g., the United Nations) that mediates and supervises joint disarmament and state-building. Ultimately, I discuss the implications of this argument for the basic intuitions of classical political theory and contemporary social theory regarding democratization and authoritarianism.

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ARTICLES
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American Political Science Review , Volume 98 , Issue 1 , February 2004 , pp. 17 - 33
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© 2004 by the American Political Science Association

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