Description: The breakup of the U.S.S.R. was unexpected and unexpectedly peaceful. Though a third of the new states fell prey to violent civil conflict, anarchy on the post-Soviet periphery, when it occurred, was quickly cauterized. This book argues that this outcome had nothing to do with security guarantees by Russia or the United Nations and everything to do with local innovation by ruthless warlords, who competed and colluded in a high-risk coalition formation game. Drawing on a structured comparison of Georgian and Tajik militia members, the book combines rich comparative data with formal modeling, treating the post-Soviet space as an extraordinary laboratory to observe the limits of great powers' efforts to shape domestic institutions in weak states.
Brief description: Jesse Driscoll is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies, University of California, San Diego. He was an fellow of the Program on Order, Conflict, and Violence at Yale University, Connecticut and a GAGE fellow at the University of Virginia, and most recently a member of the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies from 2009-13. His work has been published in the Journal of Conflict Resolution, Research and Politics, and the Journal of Survey Statistics and Methodology.
Review Quotes: 'Warlords and Coalition Politics in Post-Soviet States offers both a rethinking of the origins of the contemporary state in Eurasia and a reexamination of the relationships among secession, violence, terrorism, and political institutions. This is state-of-the-art political science - a book about real people grappling with matters of life and death, whose experiences we strain to understand using both abstract models and savvy ethnography. Jesse Driscoll helps us see how post-Soviet politics sometimes emerged as the continuation of war by other means.'
Charles King, Georgetown University, Washington DC