DSquared has a post on JEM launching an attack on Khartoum today. He thinks the various militias will resemble little more than criminal gangs in the near future, with a footnote warning against our own smugness as “the Free Companies went in for this sort of thing in the fourteenth century and made lots of Italy a purely horrible place to live in.” This is basically Tilly’s (now sadly departed) argument in his famous essay. But today could be seen as quite different to the C14 in the following ways:

1. There are ready made states with external legitimacy (in the international system of states), but lack internal legitimacy.
2. Easy access to a plethora of low-to-medium damage weapons. Weapon financing isn’t carried out by wholly separate competing organizations, but organizations fighting over parts of the state.
3. No access to the big weapons that could clearly differentiate the competing groups.
4. No wars of religion to homogenize ethnic identity.
5. The winning organizational forms today (OECD nation states) are too divergent, having followed long path dependencies for easy and stable isomorphism to occur.