Routledge Handbook of African Politics

Coming roughly six decades after independence, the publication of this volume coincides with the emergence of an ‘Africa rising’ rhetoric in place of the pessimism that had characterized much of the preceding decades' assessments of the continent's political and economic development prospects. Its 32 chapters, divided into six parts, represent an impressive coverage of the perennial themes and topics that dominate the debates on African economic and social development as well as those taught in undergraduate and graduate programmes in African politics across the world: the state; identity; conflict; democracy and electoral politics; political economy and development; and international relations. Together, they capture most of the major twists and turns, achievements, and challenges experienced in the processes of nation building and state building since independence, and the dilemmas they posed. The volume benefits from the fine editorial hands of Nic Cheeseman and his associates, and its cast of contributors represents some of the best Africanist and African area social scientists and subject specialists located in North American, European, and African research institutions and universities (which raises the question of whether there are any Latin American and Asian Africanists?). Each chapter begins with a concise and often very lucid overview of the key concepts it uses to analyse the empirical evidence and political developments under discussion. Undergraduate and postgraduate students in African universities who are typically starved of textbooks and inadequately exposed to the concepts and theories that underpin the subjects they research should find this extremely useful. Those studying the complex but growing convergence between religion and politics in contemporary African politics, for instance, would find the scope for their own research and analysis of this very complex relationship significantly broadened by Ellis and ter Haar's working definition, in Chapter 10, of the concept that places emphasis on the ‘spiritual element of religion’ (p. 122). The Handbook has many other admirable qualities. Most of the chapters are highly informative, and their arguments are empirically grounded as well as cogent. The analyses, typically and quite explicitly, take into account key factors and developments in Africa's distant and recent past, thus shedding light on the dynamic interplay between ‘the old’ and ‘the new’ in the politics of contemporary Africans. A broad historical canvas of African politics and ideological heterodoxy helps the book to produce several important dividends. A good but by no means isolated example is Cheeseman's magisterial Chapter 1, that convincingly links factors and developments in the continent's authoritarian past to the one-party state and autocratic governance syndrome that prevails in Africa today, including some of its few liberal political regimes.