As many as 500,000 people lost their lives in the wake of the Soviet experiment. Civil wars were fought in Azerbaijan, Bosnia, Croatia, Georgia, Kosovo, Moldova, the North Caucasus, Romania, and Tajikistan. Though the thought experiment requires a grisly kind of arithmetic, social scientists can assert with confidence that longer civil wars likely would have resulted in many more deaths. How did order consolidate so quickly in the post-Soviet space?

This book presents a host of new data and original game theory to revisit the basic intuition of Thomas Hobbes (1651): anarchy creates strong incentives for people to build states. I demonstrate that political order arose out of violent anarchy because violence entrepreneurs – warlords hereafter – realized that the great powers would pay handsomely for local order. Order facilitates efficient markets (for foreign investors) and local-language intelligence collection (for foreign militaries). Warlords understood that they were in a position to extort certain rents of sovereignty from the international system and wanted to be bought out in the scramble that followed the collapse of the USSR. The ancient truism that “war is bad for business” was quickly grasped by certain individuals who realized that they were in a rare position to extort civilian governments directly – and the international community indirectly – with anarchy. Foot soldiers were recruited from the sub-proletarian underclass through promises of future state spoils. Some warlords initially colluded to provide order, access international wealth, and allocate themselves monopoly rents from the state apparatus that fell under their control. A local puppet president served as a placeholder for opaque coalition politics. Many warlords became violence subcontractors for the regime. Some did not. Complicated bargaining followed. Back-room deals were struck. A great deal of property changed hands. Peace emerged as local criminals developed techniques to hold civilians hostage and rewrite local history to their advantage.