For scholars of African politics, the state looms large because of its smallness. Observers have long recognized that modern African states suffer from fundamental institutional weaknesses, the downstream consequences of which are attributable to many of the continent's perennial problems—poverty, political instability, and violent conflict. For many, state weakness is a relic of the untidy and at times unambitious colonial state, a condition treated splendidly in Crawford Young's earlier work, The African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (Yale University Press, 1994). His newest book, The Postcolonial State in Africa, is a long-awaited companion, and illustrates how the imperatives of the rickety but functional colonial state were refashioned after independence into persistent patterns of political authority. Young's refreshing continental view ambitiously considers all fifty-four independent states across half a century of political life. He guides his career-long observations of Africa into a single conceptual stream that flows through the postcolonial state.

Since independence, African states have gone through five phases, each interwoven with cycles of optimism and pessimism. In the first phase, the dominolike decolonization of the 1950s and 1960s provided a celebratory bookend of the good days that certainly lay ahead. This gave way to the more cynical second phase of the 1960s and 1970s, characterized by centralized authority, venal single-party systems, and in many cases, military rule. The third phase of the 1970s saw an optimistic interlude, with relative peace and ideological certitude fueling state expansion. Moreover, military regimes as effective stewards of African states remained a misdiagnosed condition. Buoyed expectations sank in the fourth phase of the 1980s along with most African economies, weighed down by onerous terms of trade, massive debt, unchecked personal rule, and demoralizing structural adjustment. Only in the 1990s did a fifth phase of democratic reform and economic liberalization breathe new optimism into African politics. Since then African states have had mixed trajectories. In tracing this process, Young anchors wide-ranging empirical observations in a comprehensive conceptual taxonomy of the postcolonial African state.

The book proceeds in three parts. Part 1 periodizes the African state and sets the conceptual scene with an artful distillation of the state-building literature, supported by remarkable empirical detail from all corners of Africa. The African state's manifold attributes (government, territory, population, sovereignty, power, law, nation, international actor, and idea) are undergirded by the six “imperatives” of hegemony, autonomy, security, legitimacy, revenue, and accumulation. This entity passed through several iterations that roughly correspond to Young's postcolonial cycles. Drifting from the effective institutional “normative” model of its optimistic birth, the “developmental” state turned more authoritarian to meet the expectations of independence. The “integral” state then reflected periods of ideological state expansion, personal rule, centralized domination, and ultimate decline. After becoming “liberalized” in response to crisis, state trajectories varied but many have settled into this modal pattern.

An important strength of the book is that in building his conceptual framework, Young historicizes key debates in African politics. He does not simply go through the established lexicon of neopatrimonialism, the “hybrid state,” state weakness, and state failure as features of the African state. He situates these debates along the arc of the very subject's study, providing a reservoir of important works and reminding us that this has been a contentious and at times exciting scholarly process. Yet a downside of his conceptual framework is its many moving parts that are difficult to render into an explanatory one. Young may very well have “found” the African state, but he has not entirely succeeded in developing a systematic causal theory that can address what lies ahead in the rest of the book.

Part 2 casts the framework against a generous empirical narrative that runs through four chapters. Chapter 3 shows that while paths to independence varied, Europe's hasty decolonization left sovereign territorial containers whose most recent political memory was colonial autocracy. Political parties were sites of nationalism and vehicles for charismatic individuals, rather than conduits for constitutional and representative institutions, which were very shallow. African populations also had limited experience in universal suffrage. Chapters 4 and 5 constitute the book's core. The African state's drift toward autocracy left behind the casualties of postcolonial constitutions, public debate, multipartyism, and nonmilitary means of regime change. Single-party domination fused state, regime, and ruler under the logic of national unity while the military justified its ascent as an able-bodied, professional steward of the national interest. Yet the expansion of a state, simultaneously hollowed out by predatory elites, soon outstripped the capacity, competence, and credibility of these regimes (173). The failures of the Inga and Ajaokuta development projects in Congo-Kinshasa and Nigeria, respectively, are emblematic. Chapter 6 describes Africa's democratization of the 1990s and the divergent trajectories that followed. As Young aptly restates key insights from Bratton and van de Walle's extensive work on the subject (Democratic Experiments in Africa, Cambridge University Press, 1997), the political violence of Burundi and Rwanda as a pathway from failed democratization sits uncomfortably in this chapter.

Again, because Young's framework is more conceptual than theoretical, it exposes the challenge in specifying how the state's six imperatives play out across multiple iterations of such a large number of states. In what becomes a conceptual and empirical tangle, it is difficult to distinguish what is actually at work in moving the African state along its roller coaster. Was Congo-Kinshasa's rise and decline the outcome of weak state machinery, the faulty programming of an authoritarian regime, or by Mobuto Sese Seko's hyperpatrimonial operation? A related issue is the commonly unresolved endogeneity bugaboo of neopatrimonialism—the exchange of personal loyalty for material reward—as an explanatory factor. In fairness, Young's treatment of the concept is crisp and far less absolutist than that of authors such as Chabal and Daloz (Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument, Indiana University Press, 1999). However, while neopatrimonialism is a feature of African politics, it remains unclear whether it was a necessary outcome of the African state's weak institutional structures, or whether its practitioners strategically shaped them, maintained them, or pushed these structures into degeneration.

Part 3 looks at two issues in African politics, violent conflict and identity politics. In chapter 7, Young typologizes Africa's political violence along lines similar to Clapham (African Guerrillas, Indiana University Press, 1998) and Reno (Warfare in Independent Africa, Cambridge University Press, 2011)—liberation struggles, separatist uprisings, reform insurgencies, and the “new wars” of post-Cold War era. His ability to distill considerable empirical material down to readable narratives on wars in Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Sudan, among others, is on display. Yet it is unclear how his observations are tied to his conceptual framework. Even if he had wished to systematically explain changes in African conflict in tandem with an evolving state morphology, he would have nevertheless fallen into some analytical traps. Notably, his treatment of “new wars”—those devoid of ideology, lacking popular support, resource driven, and highly predatory—strays into theoretical terrain that is far from settled in the broader scholarship on civil wars and insurgent violence. Kalyvas in particular has questioned whether this is a valid distinction, suggesting that incomplete data, a focus on macro rather than micro cleavages, and uncritical acceptance of conceptual categories have harmed sound theorizing about the nature of civil wars (The Logic of Violence in Civil Wars, Cambridge University Press, 2006). In chapter 8, Young successfully connects two strands of what he describes as the “triple helix of identity” to his overall argument in explaining how the African state comfortably fits into its sovereign skin of international jurisprudence. In many ways, the African state persists because of tangible pan-African identity and a distinct territorial nationalism. This has created a durable system of African states that are reinforced by both international legal doctrine and norms of interstate cooperation. However, for the third strand, while Young resurrects his own sound observations about ethnic identity in Africa, he does not convincingly tie them directly to a theory of the postcolonial state.

In sum, where The Postcolonial State in Africa falls somewhat short in theoretical elegance, its impressive conceptual scope and veteran empirical analysis compensates. It also serves as a memoir of sorts. Having been engaged in Africa since the mid-1950s, there are few American scholars who have observed Africa so closely and comprehensively, or who have so influenced the study of African politics. As a study of the modern African state, this volume proudly sits alongside Bayart's The State in Africa (Polity, 2009), Herbst's States and Power in Africa (Princeton University Press, 2000), and Goran Hyden's African Politics in Comparative Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2012).