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McGovern Mike . A Socialist Peace? Explaining the Absence of War in an African Country . Chicago : University of Chicago Press , 2017. xxi + 249 pp. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $90.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978-0-226-45357-6. $30.00 Paper. ISBN: 978-0-226-45360-6. $30.00. E-book. ISBN: 978-0-226-45374-3.
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POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GLOBALIZATION
In this significant contribution to postcolonial African political studies, Mike McGovern assumes the challenge of explaining a negative: why do people choose not to go to war, when neighbors facing similar societal fractures have engaged in extensive intracommunal violence? This question is especially fraught in the Mano River region of West Africa, where Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d'Ivoire were torn apart by brutal internal conflicts, while Guinea experienced ethnically based massacres but avoided widespread ethnic cleansing and civil war. In his search for answers, McGovern homes in on a pivotal six-month period in 2000 to 2001 in Guinea's forest region, where ethnic polarization, scarcity of resources, and episodic violence might have led to civil war, but did not.
McGovern's conclusion stands received wisdom on its head. While acknowledging the brutality of Sékou Touré's postindependence regime (1958-1984), McGovern rejects the common scholarly view that reduces Guinea's socialist nation-building project to an exercise in repression and challenges the oft-stated claim that democracy, rather than state socialism, is...