ABSTRACT
Actors involved in armed conflict in which the state structures have collapsed use military force as a political instrument and fight in a conventional manner.1 This is the last of the hypotheses this study aims to test. The use of the military instrument for political purposes in a conventional manner will further prove the continuing validity of Clausewitzean thinking. Many students of the wars in Liberia and Somalia have questioned the rationale of the use of the military instrument; was it used for a purpose at all? When the military instrument was employed to achieve an aim, the observers stressed its irregular and guerrilla nature. Regarding this last element, it can be asked whether the concept of guerrilla war is appropriate for describing the wars in Liberia and Somalia. The previous two chapters have already brought forward, among other findings, the role of personalised rule and the lack of ideological motivation. In one of the most important formulations of guerrilla war, that by Mao Tse-tung, the elements of individual leadership and political interests did not play the same role as described so far. Individual leadership was subjected to the collective of ideologically motivated fighters, which also formed the guiding principle of war.2 Political interests in Mao’s guerrilla war were concerned with the destruction of the existing political and economic order of society. The two wars in this study did not show any questioning of the make-up of the state or society. Rather, emphasis in the wars was placed on the hands in which the rule rested.
