Crafting Peace

Crafting Peace analyzes warlords in depth, including their organizational structure and the context in which they operate, ultimately exploring the effectiveness of various short and long-term strategies to deal with warlords. Instead of focusing strictly on economic causes, the focus here is on the extremely frail politial/security environment that allows warlords to rise up, seize power, and profit in the midst of chaos. This deeper political context, under-analyzed in other texts in terms of its effect on warlordism, is crucial to understanding both why warlords arise and how they should be dealt with. This book suggests a two-pronged strategic approach to help craft peace: unseating certain intransigent warlords through immediate, coercive measures; and taking away the anarchic environment in which these actors thrive by implementing several policies aimed at rebuilding law and order over the long-term. Sasha Lezhnev discusses this approach by looking at real-world cases in Sierra Leone and Tajikistan. Crafting Peace presents a new way of looking at eliminating warlords and restoring peace in war-torn states that will prove essential to both scholars and practitioners in international relations and political science.

Author Biography

Sasha Lezhnev is program officer at Northern Uganda Peace Initiative.