Africa: Unity, Sovereignty and Sorrow (review)

Why don't things fall apart, at least when the "things" in question are African states? Or for some of those states, why don't they disappear, why do they still matter, even when they have fallen apart—imploded or virtually stopped providing any services or functions that are expected of even the most minimal of polities? Since Robert H. Jackson and Carl G. Rosberg's seminal article "Why Africa's Weak States Persist"(World Politics 35 [1], 1982), scholars have had to face these questions. A recent entrant is Pierre Englebert, whose Africa: Unity, Sovereignty and Sorrow teems with insights and arguments about how states in Africa "simultaneously display decay and stability, weakness and resilience"(3). Not only wide-ranging in terms of the examples on which it draws, the book shows the author's deep familiarity with the issues and intelligence at work in the way he connects his cases to the categories that illuminate his key analytical concerns. This is a smart and engaging book, one from which you are constantly learning, whether nodding along in agreement or at times arguing back.

As many readers will recall, the core of the Jackson–Rosberg thesis (almost thirty years old now) was that African states persist because the basis of their statehood, and the reproduction of it, was juridical—i.e., sanctified by international law as part of the decolonization process. In spite of lacking the empirical attributes of statehood—either in terms of monopolizing legitimate violence or of reciprocally delivering on their side of the social contract—African states did not disappear because the international norms of recognition wouldn't let them. They continued, in spite of their lack of "state-ness," at least as this quality has been imagined in other parts of the world.

There was always something intuitively right about the thesis; it almost read like common sense. But there was also something that did not quite satisfy, and Englebert has articulated it well. What is the mechanism, he asks, that turns the juridical quality of states into the actual reproduction of state boundaries and institutions? Why do even opponents of the ruling elites of African states, and so many citizens who fail to benefit from state policies and practices, contribute to the reproduction of states rather than attempting secession or otherwise establishing their own autonomous polities? Englebert rightly argues that one cannot answer this question simply by reference to international law. This book thus focuses on how juridical matters connect with socioeconomic and political structures on the ground as well as what is in the heads of African citizens—their strategies, identities, imaginations, and emotions.

For Englebert, this connection is the relationship between sovereignty (i.e., international sovereign recognition) and the domestic politics of what he calls "legal command," defined as "the capacity to control, dominate, extract, or dictate through law." Legal command, conferred by international sovereignty, is "what endures of African statehood in times of weakness or failure" (62). The most banal bureaucratic procedures are thus implicated not only in the reproduction of power, but also in the idea of what power looks like and does. Englebert recounts traveling to a rebel-controlled part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and being asked to produce a document authorizing his travel: "I was perplexed that rebel authorities cared for an order of mission from the government they were fighting and whose legitimacy they were challenging, and I kept arguing that I was not on a mission from the government, so how could I produce such a document? For her part, the airport security agent was equally perplexed by my attempt at free movement without some authorization from someone" (69).

The bulk of Africa traces the logic of the power of legal command, showing how it helps us understand multiple cases of neglected or oppressed communities (from Zambia to Cameroon to Nigeria to DRC) whose elites and everyday citizens rarely consider secession, even when that...