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I. William Zartman, ed., COLLAPSED STATES: THE DISINTEGRATION AND RESTORATION OF LEGITIMATE AUTHORITY (Boulder, Colo.: Lynne Rienner, 1995), 312 pages.
A leading scholar of negotiation and African politics, I. William Zartman has assembled a superior collection of essays on state collapse/state restoration, launched with his own stimulating theoretical overview. Although not indicated in the book's title, the study is essentially one of state-society relations in Africa. The topic of state collapse could scarcely be more relevant to the continent given the ongoing round of state collapse occasioned by the wave of political reform that has swept Africa since 1990.
The book's seventeen chapters are organized into four substantive sections (not counting the introduction and conclusion): (1) "States Collapsed and Reconstructed," (2) "Current Collapse and Future Restoration," (3) "States in Danger," and (4) "Potential Agents of Reconstruction." The first section contains essays on Chad (William Foltz), Uganda (Gilbert Khadiagala), and Ghana (Donald Rothchild); the second covers the cases of Somalia (Hussein Adam), Liberia (Martin Lowenkopf), Mozambique (Barry Schutz), and Ethiopia (Edmond Keller). The third section includes the cases of Angola, which is compared with the Soviet Union (Leonid Fituni), Zaire (Herbert Weiss), Algeria (Azzedine Layachi), and South Africa (Sipho Shezi). The fourth section covers the following topical issues in relation to state collapse: humanitarian relief (Francis Deng), foreign intervention (Ibrahim Gambari), democratization (Marina Ottaway) and strongman rule in reconstruction (Njuguna Ng'ethe).
The introduction superbly sets the theoretical stage. In including so many case studies, however, Zartman made a trade-off, sacrificing depth and detail for breadth. As a result, the book...