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Property and Political Order in Africa. Land Rights and the Structure of Politics by Catherine Boone Cambridge : Cambridge University Press , 2014. Pp. xvi + 416. £21·99 (pbk)
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Property rights in land, and their social complexities, negotiation and contestation, are a central theme of much analysis of rural dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa in relation to a wide range of issues. Those encompass, and sometimes connect, agrarian change and development policy, political authority and social differentiation in the countryside, violent conflict and war, and such other topical and highly charged themes as 'land grabbing' and climate change and other ecological pressures.
Catherine Boone's previous Political Topographies of the African State: Territorial Authority and Institutional Choice (Cambridge University Press, 2003) centred on the powers of regionally differentiated rural elites and how they affect state formation and capacities. She proposed a matrix of low/high social standing (principally in terms of chieftancy), and low/high economic autonomy, of rural elites which generate their strengths and weaknesses as allies or rivals of the central state. This was applied to, and illustrated by, marked regional variation in Senegal (three cases), Côte d'Ivoire (two cases) and Ghana (two cases)....