Capsule Reviews

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Capsule Review,
Mar/Apr
2010
Edited by Brian Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo
Reviewed by Nicolas van de Walle

As Zimbabwe's political and economic collapse enters its second decade, this book summarizes the historical and structural factors that led to it. Western observers tend to blame Robert Mugabe's regime for the crisis, whereas the Zimbabwean scholars represented in this volume place it in a broader historical context (although they certainly do not exculpate the regime).

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Capsule Review,
Mar/Apr
2010
James L. Gibson
Reviewed by Nicolas van de Walle

As Gibson's book reminds readers, land issues lie at the heart of racial politics in contemporary South Africa. Employing opinion surveys to investigate South African attitudes about land, Gibson finds that for black South Africans, the expropriation of ancestral lands remains the central feature of the hated apartheid state. They view the redistribution of territory as a necessary righting of historical wrongs.

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Capsule Review,
Mar/Apr
2010
Patrick Manning
Reviewed by Nicolas van de Walle

There are one billion Africans and people of African descent in the world. Manning's comprehensive history of the world's black population since the beginning of the fifteenth century focuses much of its attention on the slave trade and its effects on the countries in which slaves ended up.

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Capsule Review,
Mar/Apr
2010
Filip Reyntjens
Reviewed by Nicolas van de Walle

The collapse of Zairean President Mobutu Sese Seko's regime in 1997 began a decade of horrendous conflict involving the Congo and most of its neighbors, killing probably more than five million people. Reyntjens has written a perceptive account of a war whose origins lie in the advanced decay of the Congolese state at the end of Mobutu's 32-year reign and in the ethnic conflict in neighboring Burundi and Rwanda. Reyntjens delineates the geopolitical motivations of the different players and the diplomatic and military relations between them.

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Capsule Review,
Mar/Apr
2010
Andrew Rice
Reviewed by Nicolas van de Walle

This enthralling account of a political murder in the Ugandan countryside in 1972 and the victim's son's efforts, 30 years later, to get a measure of justice is a highly readable narrative of a murder investigation and trial. It is also a deeply perceptive chronicle of Uganda's troubled past that sheds much light on contemporary Africa. Eliphaz Laki, an administrative chief in rural southwestern Uganda, was executed because of his political opposition to the Idi Amin regime.

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Capsule Review,
Mar/Apr
2010
Howard B. Schaffer
Reviewed by Robert M. Hathaway

In lives lost, wars spawned, and reputations ruined, the territorial dispute over Kashmir surely ranks near the top of all the world's intractable conflicts. Schaffer, a retired U.S. ambassador with decades of experience in South Asia, has written an exemplary account of the United States' efforts over 60 years to settle, or at least manage, this problem. From 1948 to 1989, U.S. diplomacy fluctuated between engagement and quiescence.

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Capsule Review,
Mar/Apr
2010
Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan

These two books study state capacity in China by looking at the government's ability to enforce its will in two different domains: intellectual property rights and religion. On the surface, the stories could not be more dissimilar. The government has failed to protect intellectual property rights, causing U.S. copyright, patent, and trademark holders (and Chinese companies, too) to lose billions of dollars a year. China's courts, administrative agencies, and local governments are too weak, corrupt, and inconsistent to stop piracy and counterfeiting.

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Capsule Review,
Mar/Apr
2010
Jonathan Holslag
Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan

Relations between China and India have thawed since the beginning of this century, and there has been a lot of talk about common interests, especially on the Indian side. Holslag analyzes the forces that are drawing the two nations closer, such as growing trade and investment ties, "road diplomacy" (tacit cooperation on opening up transportation routes in places such as Myanmar and Nepal), and shared concerns over the unstable buffer states of Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan.

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Capsule Review,
Mar/Apr
2010
Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan

With the recent global economic crisis, the West has stumbled. Garnaut's book is chiefly about why, Dobson's is chiefly about how, and the Strategic Asia volume examines the resulting strategic shift toward Asia. But all three works agree that the ensuing power shift need not cause alarm. According to Garnaut, a leading Australian economist and former ambassador to China, the financial crash merely accelerated a movement long under way toward a "quadripolar" power structure consisting of the United States, the EU, China, and India.

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Capsule Review,
Mar/Apr
2010
Edited by Scott D. Sagan
Reviewed by Andrew J. Nathan

In May 1998, India conducted a nuclear test that did little to advance the country's long-standing nuclear weapons program but did advertise its existence to the world. What explains the timing? Contributors to this volume emphasize the domestic political calculations of then Indian Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, who, by ordering the blast and standing up to U.S. sanctions, strengthened his party and stabilized his coalition government.

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