Rebel Economies : Warlords, Insurgents, Humanitarians Paperback / softback

As a pervasive occurrence in the contemporary world, wars and their economic sources are defining social and political processes in a variety of national and transnational contexts.

Rebel Economies: Warlords, Insurgents, Humanitarians explores historical, anthropological and political dimensions of war economies by non-state actors across different periods and regions, while presenting their multiple manifestations as a unified, congruent phenomenon.

Through a variety of conceptual and disciplinary approaches, the authors investigate, in the past and present and across three continents, the nexuses between economy, war, social transformation and state-building, revealing in the process differences and similarities that would otherwise remain hidden.

Through this broad-gauge approach, the book aims, first, to rethink much of the debate around “non-state war economies,” and, secondly, to expand the conversation by consciously treating this theme as a conspicuous and distinct aspect of both economy and war.

This is not just a different approach but a fundamental departure from the ways in which current discussions over the economy of wars, civil conflicts, and revolutions, have informed research orientations over several decades.