State Collapse: Somalia, Libya, and the Warlord Argument
Position
“Every time a state collapses, what fills the void is warlords” is the most common historical argument against non-state governance. It is also the most misleading.
What These Cases Actually Are
Somalia and Libya are not clean experiments in “what happens when people try bottom-up self-organization.” They are cases of:
- Violent regime breakdown
- Factional militarization
- External meddling (arms flooding, patron states competing for influence)
- Armed groups competing to become the new state or capture its rents
Yes, warlordism happened. That’s what happens when you destroy institutions, flood a country with weapons and patrons, and leave people fighting over the remnants of centralized coercive infrastructure.
The Double-Edged Sword
If the standard is “when the state collapses, bad actors fill the vacuum,” congratulations: you’ve just described why concentrating power in a single choke point is dangerous. When it fails, everything fails at once.
Distributed systems fail locally and recover locally. Centralized systems fail catastrophically.
What These Cases Do NOT Prove
- They do not prove that bottom-up governance fails (it was never tried — these are top-down collapses)
- They do not prove humans need a sovereign (they prove armed factions compete to become one)
- They do not prove that “anarchy = chaos” (anarchy is a governance proposal, not the absence of one)
Objection Handling
| Move | Response | Concession |
|---|---|---|
| ”Somalia proves anarchy fails” | Somalia is not an anarchist experiment. It is a violent regime collapse with external meddling. Armed groups fighting to become the new state is not evidence against alternatives to states — it’s evidence FOR why concentrating power in a single point is dangerous. | Accepts that state collapse produces bad outcomes, conceding centralized systems have catastrophic failure modes |
| ”Show me the fair test that survived” | You’re treating “not being crushed by states” as proof that states are necessary. If a mafia destroys every business that refuses protection money, the conclusion is not “protection rackets are the only viable business model.” | Concedes no fair test has been permitted, implicitly acknowledging state systems suppress alternatives |
| ”The strong dominate the weak without a state” | Route to phil/nature.md. Also: the strong dominate the weak WITH a state — they just do it through institutional channels. The question is which design limits domination more effectively. | Accepts domination is the problem to solve, not hierarchy per se |