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Catherine Boone , Property and Political Order in Africa: land rights and the structure of politics . New York NY : Cambridge University Press (hb US$108 - 978 1 107 04069 4 ; pb US$35.99 - 978 1 107 64993 4 ). 2014, xvi + 416 pp.
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With the publication of her latest book, Property and Political Order in Africa, Catherine Boone demonstrates why she is considered one of the leading scholars of contemporary African politics. Endeavouring to explain the recent rise in land-related conflict across Africa, Boone argues that while the exogenous shock of heightened competition for land is common throughout much of the continent, it is the different ways in which rural state institutions, specifically land tenure regimes (LTRs), 'refract' these external pressures that ultimately determine variations in the form that these land-related conflicts take in practice.
In Part I, Boone outlines her central hypothesis, arguing that in their conceptualization of rural Africa as invariant, institutionless and beyond the reach of the state, political scientists have often neglected key structural and institutional variables that shape political behaviour in these areas, such as rural property regimes. To better understand the political effects of these institutions and their relationship to land-related conflict, Boone develops a typology of LTRs, dividing them into two broad categories: 'neocustomary' and 'statist'. In the former, land, which under colonialism was specially endowed to ethnic communities, is governed...