Capsule Reviews

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Capsule Review,
Jan/Feb
2010
Edited by Augustin Fosu, Germano Mwabu, and Erik Thorbecke
Reviewed by Nicolas van de Walle

This collection of essays by leading development economists provides an excellent introduction to the causes and effects of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Although some of the papers are dated, they remain useful. One section of the book includes several contributions about the nature of poverty in the region, with a particularly informative chapter on poverty in the African countryside. Another section questions the conventional wisdom that economic reforms in the 1980s and 1990s aggravated poverty, painting a more nuanced picture.

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Capsule Review,
Jan/Feb
2010
Edited by Joel D. Barkan
Reviewed by Nicolas van de Walle

Most observers would concur with Barkan's view that democracy cannot thrive without an effective and influential legislature to balance the power of the executive. Since most of the recent defects in governance in Africa can be blamed on unaccountable leaders, this view seems particularly germane to democracy there. Yet, oddly, the evolution and current state of legislatures in Africa have attracted little attention. This collection of case studies of the legislatures in Benin, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, and Uganda begins to rectify this oversight.

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Capsule Review,
Jan/Feb
2010
René Lemarchand
Reviewed by Nicolas van de Walle

A longtime observer of the Great Lakes region of Africa, Lemarchand has conducted an incisive study of the Hutu-Tutsi violence in Rwanda and Burundi and the conflict it helped propagate in the Democratic Republic of the Congo in the mid-1990s. He emphasizes the evolution of the region's ethnic conflicts over long periods of time, revealing a dynamic in which episodes of violence force certain groups to migrate, which then puts them in conflict with other groups. That, in turn, eventually creates another cycle of violence and forced migration.

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Capsule Review,
Jan/Feb
2010
Deborah Brautigam
Reviewed by Nicolas van de Walle

Brautigam situates the current relationship between China and Africa within a historical framework that goes back to the 1960s. Bucking the conventional wisdom that China's substantial increases in aid to the region are motivated by short-term commercial and strategic interests, Brautigam's lively and thoroughly documented account emphasizes that Chinese motivations are broader and more long term. The book starts with a revealing history of Chinese involvement in the region, beginning with agricultural and infrastructure projects in the 1960s.

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Capsule Review,
Jan/Feb
2010
Michela Wrong
Reviewed by Nicolas van de Walle

Wrong has written a perceptive and deeply troubling account of corruption in Kenya and of one anticorruption crusader's failed attempts to curtail it. John Githongo became permanent secretary for governance and ethics after the democratically elected president Mwai Kibaki took office in 2002 promising great change. Naive, but persistent and principled, Githongo soon uncovered massive corruption at the apex of the state, within a Kikuyu ethnic mafia around the presidency whose members believed that, after years out of power, it was time for their ethnic group to benefit.

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Capsule Review,
Jan/Feb
2010
Edited by Ho-Fung Hung
Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan

This symposium uses the Marxist-inflected theory of globalization known as world-systems theory to view some familiar topics through a fresh lens, although it is often blurred by jargon. Subjects addressed include how China's engagement with global capitalism has contributed to the rise of far-flung production networks, the shift of manufacturing to the East, the growing Asian resource hunger, and new geopolitical rivalries.

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Capsule Review,
Jan/Feb
2010
David I. Steinberg
Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan

Steinberg gives a pointed briefing on what ails Myanmar (also called Burma) and finds the causes mostly in history. The kingly past bequeathed a zero-sum concept of power; the colonial era, irrational borders and a toxically unequal distribution of wealth among ethnic groups; and postindependence military rule, a decline in state capacity and a turn to predation.

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Capsule Review,
Jan/Feb
2010
Lynne Joiner
Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan

John Service was one of several China hands fired from the U.S. State Department for questionable loyalty in the early 1950s. His trouble started when he got entangled in the inquiry into the leaking of classified documents by federal employees to the academic journal Amerasia, a spy case that turned out to be more about FBI misconduct than Soviet espionage. He was not indicted, but the investigation led to his interrogation before a series of State Department and congressional committees and to his firing.

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Capsule Review,
Jan/Feb
2010
James C. Scott
Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan

Scott has put rural and marginal people at the center of his previous studies, and here he offers a history of the estimated 100 million people who live in a vast hill and mountain zone that runs across southwest China, northeast India, and parts of five Southeast Asian countries. These populations fled into the hills over the course of two millennia, he argues, to avoid the imposition of slavery, indentured labor, and taxes by expanding states. There they evolved languages, economies, and ways of life designed to keep the state at bay.

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Capsule Review,
Jan/Feb
2010
Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan

India's interests stretch far beyond its immediate periphery, covering several wide arcs from the Middle East through Central Asia, China, and Southeast Asia all the way to Japan, and they intersect at every point with the interests of Russia and the United States. No wonder New Delhi aspires to great-power status -- and has begun to earn it with economic growth, a naval buildup, and smarter diplomacy. Sikri, a retired Indian diplomat, expresses the Indian perspective straightforwardly.

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