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Reviewed by:
  • Violence, Political Culture and Development in Africa
  • Stephen Ellis
Kaarsholm, Preben , ed. 2006. Violence, Political Culture and Development in Africa. Oxford: James Currey; Athens: Ohio University Press; Pietermaritzburg: University of KwaZulu–Natal Press. 208 pp. $24.00 (paper).

So many essay collections are being produced these days that they run the risk of becoming devalued. In the days before personal computers, publishers offered fewer volumes of this sort, and more time and thought went into the production of each one. This is a pity, as, at its best, a volume of collected essays can be a milestone of scholarship, the permanent record of a debate at a high point of its formulation.

Not that the collection under review—ten papers, including the introduction, all but one of them by North Atlantic authors based in Europe—is a bad example of the genre. It is well produced, contains essays on a fair spread of African countries, and is furnished with a competent index. What it lacks is a sharp focus, and this lack, given the number of new books arriving on the market each week, means that it risks being consulted only rarely.

If so, it would be a shame for authors who have something really fresh or noteworthy to say. Two of the papers deserve mention in this regard. William Reno has contributed a comparative piece on why some private armies or local militias turn nasty, killing and plundering the local population, while others are less vicious. He uses as his main examples the Bakassi Boys and the Oodua People's Congress, both from Nigeria. "The key to untangling the riddle of who becomes predatory and who maintains order," he writes (p. 32), "lies in determining where people were located in pre-conflict political networks of collapsing states." Douglas Johnson's paper on Darfur, by contrast, makes no attempt at formulating general insights of this sort, but, though only twelve pages long, it provides an exceptionally lucid analysis of a complex story. Somebody should give copies to Mia Farrow and George Clooney.

Of the nine papers (if we exclude the editor's introduction), all but Reno's are single-country studies of a particular context marked by violence, but five of them are not really about violence as such. Nigel Eltringham's essay is on how Rwandans think about the 1994 genocide, while Jocelyn Alexander (on Zimbabwe) and Alessandro Triulzi (on Ethiopia) write about memories of violence, rather than the violence itself. Mats Utas writes about media in the Liberian wars, and Paul Richards seeks to understand [End Page 99] the Revolutionary United Front of Sierra Leone in terms of a sociology of war, rather than of violence per se. The latter papers show signs of being hastily written: Utas has not thought his line of argument through, while Richards jumps confusingly from one aspect to another without providing clear or convincing links between phases of his argument. The remaining essays are by Koen Vlassenroot on Eastern Congo and Preben Kaarsholm on KwaZulu-Natal.

The nine papers don't have anything much to say about political culture or development, though Preben Kaarsholm tries to make up for this omission in his introduction, the first of his two contributions to the volume. This is a broad-ranging piece, which discusses recent changes to African states, makes the customary ritual denunciation of Robert Kaplan, and passes on to a rather unincisive four pages on political culture and political development. It seemed to this reviewer as though Professor Kaarsholm was a bit stuck for things to say, as sometimes happens to authors of introductions to collections that lack a strong theme.

We are told that the majority of the chapters began life as presentations at a workshop held in Denmark in May 2002, with further contributions being added later. Ideally, the participants should have worked harder at thrashing out what their contributions have in common, beyond a general concern with Africa and violence, or on what points they have interesting and productive differences.

Stephen Ellis
Afrika Studie Centrum, Leiden
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