The conceptualisation that was generated in the 1990s tended to be focused on high-level, infamous characters. I argue here that this has occurred not because there are no longer cases of warlordism in Africa, but because certain conceptual problems have been created around the African warlord. And yet now, with some form of war or political violence in half of Africa's states, we might ask: where are all the warlords? The use of the term to apply to actors of contemporary war and violence seems to have vanished.
‘Warlords’ were seen everywhere – from Mogadishu-based ‘General’ Aideed, to Liberian rebel-cum-president Charles Taylor, to Joseph Kony and his Lord's Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, to Inkatha leaders in the Natal region of South Africa, to Foday Sankoh of the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone. 1 From the issue flowed a surge of scholarly interest and empirical study of warlordism that lasted through the 1990s and into the 2000s.
In 1989, in a special issue of the Review of African Political Economy, an academic consensus was established that the term ‘warlord’ was useful in the African context.
