Strongmen and warmaking

Abstract

This essay asks whether warmaking can discipline the contemporary strongman regimes, as Tilly's account of European state formation might suggest it once did absolutism. To probe this question, it briefly revisits two non-European cases: New Kingdom Ancient Egypt and Warring States China. In neither does the European pattern hold. These historical cases help us identify the scope conditions for the mechanism identified by Tilly. Put briefly, warmaking generates the resistance that can constrain a personalised centre if the mechanisms of extraction are still being built rather than inherited, if the resisters to the centre hold their own autonomous resources, and if the pace of centralisation is slow enough to give the resisters time to organise. Most contemporary strongman regimes lack at least the first two of these, suggesting that warmaking in the twenty-first century will not provide the constraint on personalised, centralised sovereignty as it did in early modern Europe.