Political Topographies of the African State

Reviewed by: Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice Donald L Sparks Boone, Catherine . 2003. Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice. New York: Cambridge University Press. xii+405 pp. $75.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper). This is almost a brilliant book. This is not to be taken as a criticism, as Catherine Boone has made a genuine contribution to better understanding the complexities of center–periphery power relationships in West Africa. Her focused attention to her theme through some four hundred pages is admirable. She makes a strong case for continued work on this subject. Her task was to answer important questions such as: "How is politics configured at the local level? How do rulers choose strategies for governing the countryside, and when do strategies change?" (p. 1). She states that her overall objective is to understand "the political forces and interests shaping actual configurations of state power at the regional and local level[s]" (p. 7). She examines unevennesses in the patterns of centralization of power and ultimately how the center governs the periphery. She shows how power in rural areas competes with (or, interestingly, sometimes reinforces) power at the center. Most importantly, from her viewpoint, is to show how local factors shape this struggle. To illuminate her theme, she conducts case studies in six regions of West Africa: Senegal's groundnut basin and Casamance area, Côte d'Ivoire's Korhogo and southern regions, Ghana's Asante region, and the Senegal River valley. She covers the colonial and immediate postcolonial era and the 1960–1980s, when, she maintains, "postcolonial state building" peaked (p. 324). In this quest, Boone makes important points. She rightly suggests that we have been guilty of looking at African rural populations in a national way, such as citing the difference between for example Tanzania's and Mozambique's peasantry (p. 24); instead, the central questions should revolve around the differences between the interests of different rural people in different areas of any one state. These differences include tenure issues, gender issues, modes of production, and climatic and other constraints—variations found in her case studies. Perhaps one of the most useful aspects of Boone's work is its relevance to Western policymakers and aid agencies. She concludes that they have made "a presumption of virtually unbridled state autonomy. When carried over into prescriptive work, this can produce widely exaggerated expectations about outside reformers' capacity to make and remake political and administrative process[es] at the local level" (p. 16). In addition, "one broad implication is that the African state is more deeply grounded in indigenous rural society than many previous accounts have suggested. Another is that the outcome of current efforts at institutional and economic reform in the countryside is highly dependent on local-level political factors that vary a great deal across space" (p. 3). Despite the recent rush to local empowerment, "Decentralization does not necessarily empower local citizens, and can simply strengthen local powerbrokers or state agents instead" (p. 4). [End Page 125] Boone maintains that since the 1960s, little analysis has been given to the variations of rural political settings and center–periphery power balances (p. 319). I am not sure that I totally agree; I do think that this issue is getting more attention now, and will likely continue to get more in the near future (p. 343). Indeed, she argues that "these matters of state formation, national integration, and political authority are far from resolved. In fact they surfaced with a vengeance after 1990 with the reigniting of territorial politics and the reopening of questions about the form and purposes (and in some cases, the viability) of the state itself" (p. 42). While I give this book high praise, I must note a few negatives. I found it astounding that no mention is given (even in the bibliography) to Michael Lipton's important, and in my opinion groundbreaking, 1977 work, Why Poor People Stay Poor: Urban Bias and World Development. I kept expecting to see such a reference to Lipton any time. Another negative, one almost as important, is the minimization of vast and varied environmental constraints: surely deforestation, desertification

Center (category theory) · Political science · Politics · Power (physics) · Rural area · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subject (documents) · Theme (computing) · African history and culture analysis · African history and culture studies · Law