The Democratization of Africa: Dynamics and Trends ed. by Alexius Amtaika, and: Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments ed. by Nic Cheeseman (review)

Two annual TOFAC conferences, one in Austin, Texas, and one in Africa (in Nigeria, every other year) honor Toyin Falola, a scholar, promoter, and imperious mentor. Through these conferences, and in the published volumes that emerge from them, Falola has built career paths for innumerable young scholars, including many African scholars. This has been a remarkable achievement, and one of the joys of the Falola-organized conferences in Austin is that they have a distinctly African bent in their attendance and tone. Animated conversations about the minutiae of Nigeria politics populate quiet corners, buffet lines, and Q&A sessions. In the mix of senior scholars, overworked junior scholars, and a few wheeler-dealers, Falola's conferences, like the edited volumes they produce, tend to have an uneven quality. The Democratization of Africa: Dynamics and Trends, edited by Alexius Amtaika, is the product of a TOFAC conference held in Durban, South Africa, in 2014, and it bears many of the usual shortcomings and strengths.

The atmosphere at TOFAC offers a welcome escape from the fastidious intellectuality of American scholarly meetings, but fastidiousness is welcome in written composition and formal presentation, and when senior editors are cautious about their reputations, such volumes are better composed. Edited volumes are the least taxing form of academic writing in the humanities, ostensibly peer-reviewed, but only by those with an interest in publishing the volume. The quality of the essays therefore rests largely on the academic rigor that individual authors demand of themselves. But just for that reason, they are a place where new ideas can be most freely developed and collaboration generated through the process of shared authorship—a place where junior scholars and under-resourced scholars can present their ideas in forms that may not be ready for peer-reviewed journals but are nonetheless worthy of the consideration of the field.

Of the two books under review, Institutions and Democracy in Africa: How the Rules of the Game Shape Political Developments, edited by Nic Cheeseman, is on more solid scholarly ground with a series of essays that all exhibit well-researched scholarship and many sharp new insights into the establishment of democratic institutions in Africa today. But Alexius Amtaika's volume has the peculiar strength of a TOFAC conference: the lively voices of African scholars deeply engaged in the social contexts of their commentaries.

Broadly, Democracy in Africa aims to reinstate the utility of "new institutionalism" as an analytical approach. Cheeseman argues against a school of thought that he claims developed in the late 1990s, one that tended to dismiss the utility of African institutions as objects of analysis. As the key example of this anti-institutionalist school of thought, he identifies Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz's Africa Works. Cheesman builds the framework for his volume as a response to, and critique of, their thesis of a "vacuous" state in Africa displaced by informal practices and an instrumental use of a "moral economy of disorder" to reinforce patrimonial structures of authority (Chabal and Daloz 1999).

Cheeseman's conclusion provides a useful taxonomy of institutionalist thought, one that reemerged to prominence in the 1990s, only to be (ostensibly) dismissed within African studies in the wake of the social crises and wars of that decade on the continent. In the wake of a pattern identified as "state failure," a series of influential studies like that of Chabal and Daloz emerged to offer alternative perspectives to cookie-cutter applications of the institutionalist analysis that seemed unequal to the African politics of that era. Cheeseman's volume insightfully argues that institutions should never have been dismissed so thoroughly, and that the stabilization and economic growth of the new millennium in Africa augurs a renewed attention to institutions...