# Of Warlords and Rodeos: Why Nothing Works - North Atlantic Books

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [194]. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: document (Web page), 2015-04-28 (publication data), https://web.archive.org/web/20200516222520/https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/blog/of-warlords-and-rodeos-why-nothing-works/. Text: document text
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Warlord-entrepreneur analysis of failed states, the governance risk around camps.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the Rise of the Warlord Entrepreneur (2015): Contributor: wrote chapter 1, Of Warlords and Rodeos: Why Nothing Works, for a collection on warlords as...
  - The Goat Rodeo Index (2010): A ten-level scale for how hard a governance mess is: many actors, competing incentives, some irrational,... (suggested by machine)
  - Why Nothing Works: identifying and quantifying the Goat Rodeo governance antipattern (2010): One-page paper: warlord entrepreneurs fill the gap when accountability fails, and the goat rodeo,... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015).
- Ideas developed here: Goat Rodeo
- Topics: Goat Rodeo / warlord entrepreneurs — governance failure (100%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: warlord entrepreneur (8 here; 4 sources in all, earliest dated 2015, 1 undated); Warlords, Inc. (3 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2015, 2 undated); Goat Rodeo (4 here; 14 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 3 undated); Why Nothing Works (2 here; 5 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 1 undated); VICE (2 here; 19 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 2 undated); rule of law (2 here; 21 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); Afghanistan (2 here; 27 sources in all, earliest dated 2009, 1 undated); Iraq (2 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); clean water (1 here; 30 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 1 undated); skills (1 here; 67 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 5 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): Warlords, Inc.; warlord entrepreneur
- Importance: core-text score 0.53 (1.00 is the top), number 68 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [25] [The Goat Rodeo Index (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/25.md): same career work: Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the Rise of the Warlord Entrepreneur
  - [115] [Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/115.md): same career work: Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the Rise of the Warlord Entrepreneur
- On the same works, just before: [25] [The Goat Rodeo Index (2011)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/25.md); [725] [Vinay Gupta l Plausible utopias | Meaning 2012 (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/725.md); [155] [Mother of Hydrogen (2012)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/155.md)
- On the same works, just after: [234] [zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » WARLORDS, INC BOOK LAUNCH!!! (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/234.md); [115] [Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the... (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/115.md)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Of Warlords and Rodeos: Why Nothing Works - North Atlantic Books, document, 2015-04-28, https://web.archive.org/web/20200516222520/https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/blog/of-warlords-and-rodeos-why-nothing-works/; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [194], https://guptaoption.com/texts/194.md.

## Passages
[passage 1](https://web.archive.org/web/20200516222520/https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/blog/of-warlords-and-rodeos-why-nothing-works/) Apr 28 Of Warlords and Rodeos: Why Nothing Works Posted by Marina Snyder – April 28, 2015 Categories: Excerpt Society & Politics by Vinay Gupta The following is an excerpt from Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the Rise of the Warlord Entrepreneur , a cutting-edge examination of new types of political actors who emerge in a world of drug cartels and transnational criminal organizations. In it, Leading experts chart the changing geopolitical landscape as the world’s elaborate but fragile political systems become increasingly vulnerable to breakdown and deliberate disruption. This book will be available on May 7! Of Warlords and Rodeos Why Nothing Works When a stream of revenue large enough to finance an armed group cannot be extracted by any legitimate nonviolent enterprise, the businessmen who rise are by their very nature violent and illicit: they are warlord entrepreneurs. It would be easy to dismiss these actors as phenomena of the edges, like cracks in neglected sidewalks, but they are really phenomena of failure, and failure is everywhere, once you let yourself see it. The cracked sidewalks are not only far away in countries with UN missions, they are in wealthy countries too, in those pockets where old industries died, leaving deskilled wastelands. In a stable, competitive environment, business eats the lunch of prospective warlord entrepreneurs. Vast capital assets, high trust networks, and deep human resources will always win against the comparatively small and disorganized warlord entrepreneur’s tenacious little businesses. But things fall apart, the center cannot hold, and a certain somebody and friends do business where the state, IBM, and Walmart have all failed. Just as scrub comes in shortly after great oaks are felled, so our warlords are first through any available gap. What is it that fails, giving the warlord entrepreneurs room for maneuver? Some say rule of law. Others, property rights or the state itself. I say it is accountability that fails: when nobody is willing to go to the wall for what is right, the failure that counts has started. The gap between no profit for business and loss of state legitimacy is filled with corrupt authorities. A warlord entrepreneur’s customers were first turned away by regular service providers, then alienated from the state. A customer should be able to get a legitimate visa, but the office is closed—except for bribes. A container ship is leaving on Thursday, but the available space is unavailable because there is nobody to inspect the shipment for arms until Monday. This area is meant to have regular police patrols, but after nine in the evening they are hardly seen.... The warlord entrepreneur is always last. It is the place you go when there is nobody else—the loan shark, the protection racket, the forged travel papers. America’s past warlord entrepreneurs are lionized. The Mafia and Vegas, baby, their town. During Vegas’s heyday, the Rat Pack fluidly bridged acting, music, politics, activism on race issues, and organized crime. Nobody doubted that Frank Sinatra was tight with the mob;

[passage 2](https://web.archive.org/web/20200516222520/https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/blog/of-warlords-and-rodeos-why-nothing-works/) is the place you go when there is nobody else—the loan shark, the protection racket, the forged travel papers. America’s past warlord entrepreneurs are lionized. The Mafia and Vegas, baby, their town. During Vegas’s heyday, the Rat Pack fluidly bridged acting, music, politics, activism on race issues, and organized crime. Nobody doubted that Frank Sinatra was tight with the mob; it was part of his charm, all part of the glamour. To this day, Vegas provides a service: vice. Once, that vice included alcohol, but now it is just drugs and prostitution. For Vegas to exist, the state had to turn a blind eye to warlord entrepreneur operations there—not just for a few years, but for decades. In this crisis—a failure of values—comes the inevitable transfer of legitimacy from the state to warlord entrepreneurs. In your mind’s eye, meet Big Joe, who could be from anywhere. He genuinely cares about your problem, as he is personally responsible for your money and for the merchandise. He will take personal responsibility for outcomes, unlike all other actors involved in the situation, who hide behind job titles, policies, and badges. Everybody else has a policy. Warlord entrepreneurs have obligations. Everybody else has a hierarchy. Warlord entrepreneurs are accountable to the situation. Our bureaucracies create an enormous gap between the laudable goals and the public-relations front and the actual dysfunction and callousness of front-line operations. Dragons grow in this gap. Every place a promise is made and then broken, the state loses legitimacy. Everywhere legitimate business will not do business, black-market business thrives. Cannot get a wire transfer from Guyana to Ghana to pay for your website, because the banks charge a fortune or simply will not send the money? That is just fine—use bitcoin like normal people. Cannot get a MasterCard in Liberia? Use a prepaid debit card from a foreign bank through your cousin in New York—and refill it by acting as a smurf for structured payments when they are laundering money. Every barrier to normalized business, to the smooth and effective functioning of business as usual, creates a shadow. In the deep shade, those dragons mature. The little man who fixes visas sprouts teeth and becomes the criminal logistics magnate of a war-torn city. His protection racket works, because this is not Iowa and his men are accountable. Five AK-47s and an old Toyota become civilization’s darning needle, holding together enough to let life go on just one more day. Everybody knows it’s wrong, but in these times, what else to do? The budding warlord entrepreneur delivers when nobody else can. Pretty soon there ’s a vehicle fleet and a pool of capital and an operations base with a small training and recruitment program. If the guy’s smart, he ’ll clean up a little and sign on with the State Department after the army leaves, providing logistics and security for programs with lax oversight. How often has this happened in Iraq and Afghanistan already? The answer is: always. Once the social

[passage 3](https://web.archive.org/web/20200516222520/https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/blog/of-warlords-and-rodeos-why-nothing-works/) of capital and an operations base with a small training and recruitment program. If the guy’s smart, he ’ll clean up a little and sign on with the State Department after the army leaves, providing logistics and security for programs with lax oversight. How often has this happened in Iraq and Afghanistan already? The answer is: always. Once the social fabric is torn, the warlord entrepreneur is like the clotting blood, the scab forming over the wound. It is a messy healing process, and infections can be terminal to the rule of law. But without the clean, smooth function of the legitimate system—without unbroken skin—these problems are inevitable. And once a situation has mostly scabbed over? The smart, logical thing to do is to mainstream the previously warlord entrepreneurs as businessmen who did rather well during the crisis period. That’s the right thing to do, isn’t it? I mean ... sure, we all know this guy had a past, but we can leave him out there in the cold, running a criminal syndicate, or we can get him to focus on his legitimate businesses ... the least bad of the bunch ... and pretty soon this kind of thinking puts the Taliban back in charge, because, you know, they’re tough on opium production. How did we wind up in this mess? The answer is disturbingly simple: we lost our legitimacy at the goat rodeo. The term goat rodeo is taken from aviation, where it means a situation in which several impossibly difficult things have to simultaneously go correctly for there to be any realistic chance of survival. The term also refers to the messy Texas practice of having small children practice their lasso skills on goats, as a safer alternative to full-sized cattle. For our purposes, a goat rodeo occurs when a committee sets out to solve a problem but is composed of individuals with different goals who are representing different classes of organization or agency. A typical post-disaster goat rodeo might include a couple of people from State Department or another government agency, some NGO reps, a few local partner organizations, and a few people from national monopolies for water and electricity, plus the host-state representatives, of course. Lacking a shared competitive framework or genuinely shared goals, the situation inevitably devolves into failure. Cooperation is impossible, because people want different things, and competition is implausible because the actors involved have entirely different rule sets. For larger problems, increase the size and diversity of the group until no action is possible at all. The size of the failure can be estimated using the scale above. Again and again, chains of command and responsibility are abrogated in complex, shared governance arrangements that produce no responsible parties when failure comes. From no-fault divorce through to Kyoto, Copenhagen, Cancun, and the Millennium Development Goals, we plead that none of us are responsible, because all of us are. Warlord entrepreneurs eat this for breakfast. Every time the world of the white picket fences or

[passage 4](https://web.archive.org/web/20200516222520/https://www.northatlanticbooks.com/blog/of-warlords-and-rodeos-why-nothing-works/) command and responsibility are abrogated in complex, shared governance arrangements that produce no responsible parties when failure comes. From no-fault divorce through to Kyoto, Copenhagen, Cancun, and the Millennium Development Goals, we plead that none of us are responsible, because all of us are. Warlord entrepreneurs eat this for breakfast. Every time the world of the white picket fences or the blue helmets of peace and justice fail to deliver on their promises, every time they burn people in internecine bickering over different priorities in the crisis, legitimacy bleeds out. Every time the bureaucrats do the wrong thing for the right reasons—or, more commonly, simply fail to do anything at all—a little more of the lifeblood of our civilization leaks out. That’s where the warlord entrepreneurs are coming from: it’s us, screwing up one day at a time. American drug policy burns half of South America. European immigration policy ensures human trafficking remains intensely lucrative. Uneasy collusion in Africa is good for business, but that’s not just legitimate business, it’s every dirty scam going—from diamond mining to over-advertising breast-milk substitutes in places where we know there ’s no clean water. You have to wonder how the world runs at all when we, the people who are supposed to be governing, supposed to be helping, cannot get our acts together. Every time we quietly complain about the bureaucracy, about lax decision making, about human resources, about inadequate briefings and vague political goals, that’s your reminder that we are part of the problem, not just vendors of the solution. My advice is to prevent goat rodeos: permit only a single class of player to participate, or fix the goal and bar those with alternative objectives. Excerpted from Warlords, Inc.: Black Markets, Broken States, and the Rise of the Warlord Entrepreneur , edited by Noah Raford and Andrew Trabulsi; excerpt by Vinay Gupta. (c) 2015, North Atlantic Books. Tags: Noah Raford Andrew Trabulsi About the Author Marina Snyder Marina is the Marketing & Digital Programs Coordinator at North Atlantic Books. After living in New Orleans and Amsterdam, and exploring a couple of continents, she returned to the San Francisco Bay Area to work at NAB. She's passionate about astrology, nonfiction books, and sustainable living, as well as all things metaphysical. Related Content View All Blog Posts The Coronation: An Essay by Charles Eisenstein Posted by Bevin Donahue – April 03, 2020 New Release Excerpt: Healing Depression Without Medication Posted by Bevin Donahue – March 17, 2020 Summer Reading Series: Martin Adams Posted by Marina Snyder – June 17, 2015 New Release: Warlords, Inc. Posted by Marina Snyder – May 12, 2015

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End of [194] Of Warlords and Rodeos: Why Nothing Works - North Atlantic Books. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.
Read next: next on the same works, [234](https://guptaoption.com/texts/234.md) zenpundit.com » Blog Archive » WARLORDS, INC BOOK LAUNCH!!! (2015); the most closely related, [25](https://guptaoption.com/texts/25.md) The Goat Rodeo Index (2011); his whole career in one file, https://guptaoption.com/story.md.