A Socialist Peace? Explaining the absence of war in an African country by Mike McGovern (review)

Counterfactuals are nigh impossible to prove, yet Mike McGovern’s latest monograph succeeds in doing just that in arguing that the absence of major violent conflict in Guinea has to be seen as part of the often ambiguous and contradictory legacy of socialism in the country. Based on thirty-five months of fieldwork between 1997 and 2013, McGovern provides a nuanced exploration of how the fragile yet enduring peace in contemporary Guinea – a regional outlier in this respect – can be traced back to the sense of national identity and unity fostered by Sekou Touré’s socialist revolution (1958–84). As McGovern demonstrates in great ethnographic detail, it is this diffuse sense of supra-ethnic, national belonging that has pulled the country back from the brink of potentially devasting out-breaks of civil war and insurgency, most notably in the early 2000s when the wars in neighbouring Sierra Leone and Liberia threatened to spill into the country.

McGovern’s central claim is that Touré’s regime inculcated in its subjects ‘durable dispositions’ (p. 2) by instituting various discursive and disciplinary practices aimed at controlling even the most transient facets of everyday sociality. Invoking Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, McGovern defines these dispositions as ‘semireflexive orientations to the world that do not require deliberation or conscious thought’ (p. 15), examples of which range from standing straight when facing the Guinean flag and the use of certain revolutionary phrases interspersed in ordinary speech to adherence to food taboos or the lowering of one’s voice when talking politics, the last being a necessary precaution against the revolutionary era’s elaborate network of civilian spies.

McGovern’s study is at its strongest when it provides visceral ethnographic descriptions of how these dispositions remain operative even today, almost thirty-five years after the end of Touré’s reign. People of all ages fall back, almost by default, on the quasi-automatic patterns of thought, turns of phrase and embodied conducts instilled during the revolution. In a particularly chilling vignette, McGovern recalls a palm wine-fuelled conversation with a group of Forestier interlocutors in the late 1990s, during which many of the locals openly contemplated ethnically cleansing the region of their Madinka neighbours and starting to do so by killing their own sister who had intermarried. That these words were never followed up by actions is something McGovern credits to the enduring influence of the moral attitudes cultivated during the Touré era. When Liberian insurgents flooded across the border with the intention of massacring Madinka groups, Forestier communities turned them away, echoing the revolutionary rhetoric by insisting that ‘We are all Guineans.’

It is McGovern’s great achievement in this book to highlight the lasting positive effects of the ambition, articulation and optimism of Touré’s revolutionary regime without glossing over its brutality and inability to deliver on its lofty promises of equality and justice. McGovern emphasizes that the existence of a coherent and future-oriented national project stood in notable contrast to the rather unimaginative visions of ‘imagined community’ that characterized the lacklustre efforts of nation building in many parts of the postcolonial world. In particular, the temporal orientation to the future that Guinean socialism promoted stands out in this regard. The future existed as a realm of utopian promise; Guinean national eschatology proved so compelling that people were ready to accept personal sacrifices for the greater good. Crucially for McGovern’s argument, it thereby also served to delegitimize the use of political violence for short-term personal gain.

As a regime so closely implicating itself in the intimate details of people’s private lives, the revolutionary state in Guinea would appear on the face of it as another avatar of the Mbembian paradigm of ‘intimate tyranny’. McGovern, however, does well to add nuance to Mbembe’s near-hegemonic hyper-pessimistic rendering...