Africa
This book, which resulted from Butcher's 44-day trip by motorbike, dugout canoe, UN motor boat, and helicopter, provides a gripping story and an absorbing look at a country that has been moving backward for half a century.
In the dry and barren border region of northeastern Uganda and northwestern Kenya, pastoralist groups have traditionally engaged in cattle raiding; in this stimulating book, Mkutu analyzes the destructive impact of modernization on this tradition.
The ethnic violence that disrupted the 2007 elections in Kenya is well analyzed in this account of that country's recent democratization and constitutional debates by Mutua, a prominent Kenyan legal scholar.
Although a common explanation for the African continent's mediocre-to-disastrous economic performance for the last 30 years has been the weakness of the private sector and its political subordination to a state elite that is less interested in long-term sustainable growth than it is in staying in power and profiting from rent seeking, relations between the private sector and the state vary across the region, as Handley makes clear in this well-informed book.
This detailed and dispassionate account of a particularly bloody military repression of opposition to the early Robert Mugabe-led ZANU (Zimbabwe African National Union) government in Zimbabwe shortly after independence provides inconvertible evidence that the current abuses of power did not emerge over time but have always constituted the main response of ZANU to contestation of its rule.
