W Reno
Biographic Data
| ID | 2845 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W Reno |
| GIVEN NAMES | W |
| FAMILY NAME | Reno |
| SIGNATURE | RENO W |
| AFFILIATIONS | Northwestern University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-7592-9610 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 62 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 423 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 62 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1993 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Security Assistance and the Crisis of the Liberal International Order
The crisis of the Liberal International Order (LIO) has intensified amid growing great-power competition, the war in Ukraine, and the erosion of multilateral institutions. This Forum examines security assistance (SA)—the training, equipping and support of external security actors—as a critical lens for understanding how this crisis is unfolding and how international order is increasingly contested in practice. The Forum consists of an introductor…
Security Force Assistance to Fragile States
Security Force Assistance (SFA) – the training and equipping of a foreign security force – represent a common form of intervention into fragile states. This introduction assesses the state of the field of SFA research and focuses on dynamics specific to recipient states with fragmented security sectors. Based on insights from the contributions to the special issue we propose a framework for research which covers conceptualisation, implementation …
How Insurgency Begins
Covid-19 and Fieldwork
This reflection article presents insights on conducting fieldwork during and after COVID-19 from a diverse collection of political scientists—from department heads to graduate students based at public and private universities in the United States and abroad. Many of them contributed to a newly published volume, Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Krause and Szekely 2020). As in the book, these contributor…
Revisiting the Civil-Military Conundrum in Africa
The military is a central component of the state and society with implications for statehood and social stability. Since independence, Africa has grappled with contentious and contradictory roles of armed forces whether they be part of or against the state. Much of the early scholarship on the role of the military tended to paint a positive picture, presenting it as a critical pillar and an agent of modernisation for the newly independent states.…
The Importance of Context When Comparing Civil Wars
Comparisons of civil wars based on attention to contextual categories do a better job of conceptualising key variables such as ethnic identity, resources, armed group membership, and concepts such as rebellion and negotiation than do studies based on large data sets and methodological individualism. This article shows how important variables and concepts apply in ways that are particular to conflicts that follow the collapse of centralised author…
The politics of security assistance in the horn of Africa
This examination of international security assistance to Somalia points to the deficiencies of conventional security assistance strategies to partners in failed states and considers elements of an ad hoc alternative security assistance strategy. The social relationships among that state failure creates undermine the political will and capacity of recipients to utilize security assistance as providers intend. This consideration of developments in …
A New Era of Insurgent Recruitment
This article surveys the way in which political scientists and non-traditional scholars have analysed insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. We contend that insurgent recruitment is different in ‘new’ wars due to globalisation. We note continuity in ‘old’ and ‘new’ civil wars, but that collapsed states and the ascent of new types of insurgents with different power bases is markedly different from a pre-globalised era. While there is nothing new ab…
Fictional States & Atomized Public Spheres
This essay explains why political order in some places gives way to especially persistent conflict and prolonged state institutional collapse. State failure is rooted in decades of personalist rule, as leaders have sought to fragment and disorganize institutions and social groups that they thought would be possible bases of opposition. This problem was considered particular to sub-Saharan Africa, but now parts of the Middle East and Central Asia …
Africa's Young Survivors
Young people in African countries often can't afford marriage and other conventional hallmarks of adulthood. Yet they have developed valuable skills in the struggle to get by
Lost in Transitions
In Harm's Way
This article explains why contemporary African regimes choose different counter-insurgency strategies and why they tend not to be population-centric. We argue that strategies correspond to the ways in which incumbent regimes in Africa deal with different segments of political society through patronage. Incumbents seek varying levels of accommodation with rebel leaders, or try to eliminate them, according to rebels' historical position within the …
Charles Taylor and Liberia
Building up to focus on a man who was far too big a personality to be contained within a small country, this engaging and well-written book starts with a history of Liberia from its origins in the nineteenth century. Emphasizing this smallness, Waugh frames Liberia's history in terms of connections to the United States that are far more important for it than for the US. Liberia was successful in important ways. Its government was stable for decad…
The Regionalization of African Security
From the perspective of officials in Africa, participating in regional conflict management is now one of the best ways for governments ... to get international resources to strengthen their own authority
Warfare in Independent Africa
This book surveys the history of armed conflict in Africa in the period since decolonization and independence. The number of post-independence conflicts in Africa has been considerable, and this book introduces to readers a comprehensive analysis of their causes and character. Tracing the evolution of warfare from anti-colonial and anti-apartheid campaigns to complex conflicts in which factionalized armies, militias and rebel groups fight with ea…
Crime and the Global Political Economy
has gone global. Conventional explanations point to ways in which criminals have exploited technological innovations, deregulation, and free markets to triumph over state sovereignty. Crime and the Global Political Economy reveals a more complex reality. Taking as a point of departure the reality that state and societal actors are challenged by - and complicit in - the expansion of criminal activities on a global scale, the authors demonstrate th…
The evolution of warfare in Africa
It is widely noted that armed conflict in Africa has evolved away from the prominence of insurgencies that are able to mobilize supporters around political programs in favor of more fragmented organizations in the service of their leaders’ quests for power and wealth. The causes of this shift are found in changes in the domestic politics of African states that have taken place in recent decades. Regime strategies to disorganize and co-opt opponen…
Understanding Criminality in West African Conflicts
Most standard analyses and policies aimed at peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction in West Africa understand members of armed groups, and especially their leaders who engaged in illicit commerce, as criminals. This analysis and the policies that follow from it miss the extent to which these transactions now contribute to the construction of new political relationships and are seen by those who participate in them as one of the few avenues…
Explaining Patterns of Violence in Collapsed States
Analyses of predatory violence that stress individual fighters' pursuits of short-term opportunities for enrichment explain why insurgents seem to be so uninterested in taking time to propagandize, recruit, and organize local populations to fight. International efforts to resolve this kind of conflict often aim to sever this link between resources, conflict, and these short-term goals. Quick opportunities do attract certain kinds of people and sh…
Building States to Build Peace
How can legitimate and sustainable states best be established in the aftermath of civil wars? And what role should international actors play in supporting the vital process? Addressing these questions, the authors of Building States to Peace explore the core challenges involved in institutionalizing postconflict states. The combination of thematic chapters and in-depth case studies covers the full range of the most vexing and diverse problems con…
The evolution of warfare in Africa
It is widely noted that armed conflict in Africa has evolved away from the prominence of insurgencies that are able to mobilize supporters around political programs in favor of more fragmented organizations in the service of their leaders' quests for power and wealth. The causes of this shift are found in changes in the domestic politics of African states that have taken place in recent decades. Regime strategies to disorganize and co-opt opponen…
Anti-corruption Efforts in Liberia
International agencies intervene to promote reform in Liberia with promises to remake the country. Yet elections produce victories for former wartime commanders and officials accused of corruption. Many of these people continue to play important roles in the economy and command vocal followings. International organizations face a choice between a more radical intervention that amounts to a counterinsurgency operation to remove these people from t…
When Things Fell Apart
Journal Article When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa by Robert H. Bates Get access When Things Fell Apart: State Failure in Late-Century Africa by Robert H. Bates. New York, Cambridge University Press, 2008. 216 pp. Cloth, $60.00; paper, $19.99. William Reno William Reno Northwestern University Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 123, Issue 4, Winter …
Markets, War, and the Reconfiguration of Political Authority in Sierra Leone
William Reno, Markets, War, and the Reconfiguration of Political Authority in Sierra Leone, Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1995), pp. 203-221
Old Brigades, Money Bags, New Breeds, and the Ironies of Reform in Nigeria
Greed and Grievance
Current scholarship on civil wars and transitions from war to peace has made significant progress in understanding the political dimensions of internal conflict, but the economic motivations spurring political violence have been comparatively neglected. This pathbreaking volume identifies the economic and social factors underlying the perpetuation of civil wars, exploring as well the economic incentives and disincentives available to internationa…
War, Markets, and the Reconfiguration of West Africa's Weak States
In recent book, I. William Zartman declares that Africa's collapsed suffer a long-term degenerative disease and offers that cure and remission are possible.' This and other analyses of conflict and declining bureaucratic capacity in African countries take the prevailing system of sovereign states as inevitable. Related govemance approaches to African political economies often prescribe social and territorial boundaries of sovereign states. That i…
The Politics of Insurgency in Collapsing States
The phenomenon of failed states might be expected to lead to the development of mass-based social movements to address the typically ensuing social problems. This article explores the general failure of reformist insurgencies to develop in failed states, using analyses of Nigeria's Bakassi Boys and Oodua People's Congress, and references to other armed groups. The cause of this failure is found in the legacy of patronage politics, especially the …
In Harm's Way
This article explains why contemporary African regimes choose different counter-insurgency strategies and why they tend not to be population-centric. We argue that strategies correspond to the ways in which incumbent regimes in Africa deal with different segments of political society through patronage. Incumbents seek varying levels of accommodation with rebel leaders, or try to eliminate them, according to rebels' historical position within the …
Reinvention of an African patrimonial state
(1995). Reinvention of an African patrimonial state: Charles Taylor's Liberia. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 109-120
Patronage Politics and the Behavior of Armed Groups
The structures of pre-conflict patronage politics in West Africa play a major role in shaping the organization and behavior of armed groups that have appeared in that region since the 1990s. Patronage networks provide the social context in which armed group leaders arise and influences how they obtain and use resources. It weighs heavily in influencing who they recruit and how fighters and leaders define their goals. Two general principles emerge…
The Counter-Insurgent State
The politics of security assistance in the horn of Africa
This examination of international security assistance to Somalia points to the deficiencies of conventional security assistance strategies to partners in failed states and considers elements of an ad hoc alternative security assistance strategy. The social relationships among that state failure creates undermine the political will and capacity of recipients to utilize security assistance as providers intend. This consideration of developments in …
The Politics of Violent Opposition in Collapsing States
In violent conflicts in places like Congo, Liberia and Sierra Leone, economic interests have crowded out ideologically articulate mass-based social movements for reform or revolutionary change to a degree that was not apparent during earlier anti-colonial struggles. Some scholars offer a ‘looting model’ of rebellion that explains the predations of politicians and warlords but it is not clear why people who receive few benefits from this – or even…
Order and commerce in turbulent areas
The recent collapse of some states, the proliferation of internal wars and of localized political authorities, so‐called ‘warlords’, challenges the homogeneity of the international system of states at its margins. These new fragmented authorities often rely upon commercial deals with outsiders to consolidate their power. This threatens officials in strong states who depend upon organized states everywhere to control their realms and control their…
Uganda's politics of war and debt relief
The return of interstate war in Africa after the end of the cold war and global awareness of predatory economic motivations for war raises the question of whether African states are reviving early modern European methods of building states. This study of Uganda's intervention in Congo reveals that this is not so. Uganda's peripheral position in the world economy, coupled with its relations with creditors, gives its leaders unexpected capabilities…
Covid-19 and Fieldwork
This reflection article presents insights on conducting fieldwork during and after COVID-19 from a diverse collection of political scientists—from department heads to graduate students based at public and private universities in the United States and abroad. Many of them contributed to a newly published volume, Stories from the Field: A Guide to Navigating Fieldwork in Political Science (Krause and Szekely 2020). As in the book, these contributor…
Warlord Politics and African States
African Weak States and Commercial Alliances
Conventional analyses of Africa's ‘failed states’ conclude that patronage networks fragment as state resources decline. As payoffs from rulers decline, once-loyal strongmen become warlords, attacking centralized authority. This article examines how rulers of weak states actually manage increasingly threatening patronage networks. The cases of Angola and Sierra Leone show how rulers use more reliable foreign mining firms and foreign private (merce…
Ironies of post‐cold war structural adjustment in Sierra Leone
Africa's creditors stress ‘capacity building’ measures to strengthen bureaucratic effectiveness to reverse economic and political decline (Dia, 1993). World Bank officials point to the East Asian example of success at using government policies and institutions to promote ‘market friendly’ growth policies insulated from the pressures of clients demanding payouts as a positive example for Africa (World Bank, 1993a). Analysts recognise, however, tha…
Anti-corruption Efforts in Liberia
International agencies intervene to promote reform in Liberia with promises to remake the country. Yet elections produce victories for former wartime commanders and officials accused of corruption. Many of these people continue to play important roles in the economy and command vocal followings. International organizations face a choice between a more radical intervention that amounts to a counterinsurgency operation to remove these people from t…
When States Fail
When States Fail: Causes and Consequences. Edited by Robert I. Rotberg. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003. 336p. $65.00 cloth, $19.95 paper. Failed states have proliferated in the last 15 years. For much of this time Robert Rotberg has played a major role in defining debates about this development. His latest edited volume is a collection of 14 essays that examine why states fail and what to do about them once they fail. Most of the con…
Security Force Assistance to Fragile States
Security Force Assistance (SFA) – the training and equipping of a foreign security force – represent a common form of intervention into fragile states. This introduction assesses the state of the field of SFA research and focuses on dynamics specific to recipient states with fragmented security sectors. Based on insights from the contributions to the special issue we propose a framework for research which covers conceptualisation, implementation …
Revisiting the Civil-Military Conundrum in Africa
The military is a central component of the state and society with implications for statehood and social stability. Since independence, Africa has grappled with contentious and contradictory roles of armed forces whether they be part of or against the state. Much of the early scholarship on the role of the military tended to paint a positive picture, presenting it as a critical pillar and an agent of modernisation for the newly independent states.…
Understanding Criminality in West African Conflicts
Most standard analyses and policies aimed at peacekeeping and post-conflict reconstruction in West Africa understand members of armed groups, and especially their leaders who engaged in illicit commerce, as criminals. This analysis and the policies that follow from it miss the extent to which these transactions now contribute to the construction of new political relationships and are seen by those who participate in them as one of the few avenues…
Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone
VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee , Seite 103 - 105
A New Era of Insurgent Recruitment
This article surveys the way in which political scientists and non-traditional scholars have analysed insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. We contend that insurgent recruitment is different in ‘new’ wars due to globalisation. We note continuity in ‘old’ and ‘new’ civil wars, but that collapsed states and the ascent of new types of insurgents with different power bases is markedly different from a pre-globalised era. While there is nothing new ab…
Explaining Patterns of Violence in Collapsed States
Analyses of predatory violence that stress individual fighters' pursuits of short-term opportunities for enrichment explain why insurgents seem to be so uninterested in taking time to propagandize, recruit, and organize local populations to fight. International efforts to resolve this kind of conflict often aim to sever this link between resources, conflict, and these short-term goals. Quick opportunities do attract certain kinds of people and sh…
Congo
The present-day Democratic Republic of Congo is regarded as a paradigmatic case of state failure. This was not always so. During the 1960s and 1970s arch-dictator Mobutu Sese Seko was regarded as a fairly successful state builder. From the time that he seized power outright in 1965 he welded together a huge and diverse territory that had been Africa's first example of state collapse shortly after independence from Belgium in 1960. Academic litera…
The Importance of Context When Comparing Civil Wars
Comparisons of civil wars based on attention to contextual categories do a better job of conceptualising key variables such as ethnic identity, resources, armed group membership, and concepts such as rebellion and negotiation than do studies based on large data sets and methodological individualism. This article shows how important variables and concepts apply in ways that are particular to conflicts that follow the collapse of centralised author…
Old Brigades, Money Bags, New Breeds, and the Ironies of Reform in Nigeria
RésuméLe Président Ibrahim Babangida du Nigèria, annonçant la Troisième République à venir, a promis que la déréglementation économique, ajoutée à la retour au régime civil, décourgerait la concurrence de l'élite pour l'acquisition des ressources de l'état. Mais cette étude découvre que le programme de réforme même devient le théatre où se livre le combat de l'élite. Les réseaux infatigables des “Vieilles Brigades” et des “Pleins d'argent” dans l…
Economic Reform and the Strange Case of “Liberalization” in Sierra Leone
The International Monetary Fund imposes policy conditions upon Sierra Leone in exchange for loans. The country's president, however, shapes these policies into tools for his domestic struggle to control strongmen‐politicians active in the informal (black) market. The president seeks political gain by manipulating creditor demands that he promote foreign in‐vestment. This internal dynamic of “reform” does not accomplish creditors' public aims of s…
Markets, War, and the Reconfiguration of Political Authority in Sierra Leone
Les étrangers jouent un rôle clé dans les stratégies adoptées par les dirigeants et les créditeurs de Sierra Leone, pour consolider les pouvoirs de l'état. On les considère comme des sources sû de revenu. En outre, les sociétés étrangères qui remplissent les fonctions autrefois confiées aux agences de l'état, aujourd'hui sérieusement détériorées, déplacent les fonctionnaires officiels corrompus. Ironiquement, l'effort fait pour simplifier et cent…
Reinvention of an African patrimonial state
(1995). Reinvention of an African patrimonial state: Charles Taylor's Liberia. Third World Quarterly: Vol. 16, No. 1, pp. 109-120
The Business of War in Liberia
Ironies of post‐cold war structural adjustment in Sierra Leone
Africa's creditors stress ‘capacity building’ measures to strengthen bureaucratic effectiveness to reverse economic and political decline (Dia, 1993). World Bank officials point to the East Asian example of success at using government policies and institutions to promote ‘market friendly’ growth policies insulated from the pressures of clients demanding payouts as a positive example for Africa (World Bank, 1993a). Analysts recognise, however, tha…
Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone
War, Markets, and the Reconfiguration of West Africa's Weak States
In recent book, I. William Zartman declares that Africa's collapsed suffer a long-term degenerative disease and offers that cure and remission are possible.' This and other analyses of conflict and declining bureaucratic capacity in African countries take the prevailing system of sovereign states as inevitable. Related govemance approaches to African political economies often prescribe social and territorial boundaries of sovereign states. That i…
African Weak States and Commercial Alliances
Conventional analyses of Africa's ‘failed states’ conclude that patronage networks fragment as state resources decline. As payoffs from rulers decline, once-loyal strongmen become warlords, attacking centralized authority. This article examines how rulers of weak states actually manage increasingly threatening patronage networks. The cases of Angola and Sierra Leone show how rulers use more reliable foreign mining firms and foreign private (merce…
Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone
Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone
Warlord Politics and African States
The dramatic reconfigurations of political authority taking place in Africa—what many term "warlordism" or "state failure"—call for an exploration of the origins of these changes, the likelihood of their durability, and their implications for the continent's regional system of states. Reno argues that the end of the Cold War as a particular configuration of the international state system changed by definition the nature of sovereignty in Africa. …
Corruption and State Politics in Sierra Leone
VRÜ Verfassung und Recht in Übersee , Seite 103 - 105
The Counter-Insurgent State
Warlord Politics and African States
Books in review
Warlord Politics and African States
Crisis and (No) Reform in Nigeria's Politics
Regime transition programs have played contradictory roles in Nigerian politics, from the end of the colonial era to the present. The latest transition program is scheduled to culminate in the installation of a civilian regime in mid-1999. An analysis of this process, through reviewing recent academic writing on this subject, reveals that transition programs play a contradictory role in Nigerian politics. Some observers see the possibility of des…
Shadow States and the Political Economy of Civil Wars
Greed and Grievance
Current scholarship on civil wars and transitions from war to peace has made significant progress in understanding the political dimensions of internal conflict, but the economic motivations spurring political violence have been comparatively neglected. This pathbreaking volume identifies the economic and social factors underlying the perpetuation of civil wars, exploring as well the economic incentives and disincentives available to internationa…
The Failure of Peacekeeping in Sierra Leone
RUF commanders have fought the government with guns bought with diamonds, brought from Liberia, or captured from their enemies. They do not have to rely on the goodwill of local inhabitants. ... The RUF bases its political power on control over diamonds
The politics of war and debt relief in Uganda
This article analyses the politics behind Uganda's relations with its multilateral creditors, particularly the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, in the context of the country's military intervention in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). Ugandan officials exploit the anxieties of creditors, which want the country to be considered a successful case of debt relief and reform to justify similar policies in other states around t…
Peacekeeping in Africa
Uganda's politics of war and debt relief
The return of interstate war in Africa after the end of the cold war and global awareness of predatory economic motivations for war raises the question of whether African states are reviving early modern European methods of building states. This study of Uganda's intervention in Congo reveals that this is not so. Uganda's peripheral position in the world economy, coupled with its relations with creditors, gives its leaders unexpected capabilities…
Armed Rebellion in Collapsed States
Standard theories of insurgency hold that marginalization from centers of power provide insurgents with social space to develop coherent organizational and ideological challenges to authority. Insurgents in recent cases of state collapse, however, do not develop ideological or organizational alternatives. This is due to the particular nature of state collapse, especially where rulers had used informal institutional networks to control populations…
Political science (57 works) · Law (49 works) · Politics (47 works) · Political economy (32 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Economics (29 works) · Law (28 works) · Development economics (20 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (19 works) · Global Peace and Security Dynamics (17 works)