The challenge of understanding the violence that engulfed sub-Saharan Africa after the end of the Cold War period has been taken up by many scholars, and has resulted in numerous conferences and a steady flow of journal articles, edited volumes and monographs. States of Violence: politics, youth and memory in contemporary Africa is the product of a conference organised in 2004 by the Institute of African Studies at Emory College. Since such conferences usually cover a number of topics, the resulting anthologies often suffer from covering too wide a range of issues. This is to some extent the case with States of Violence.

The book is organised into three main themes: ‘modern states and the legal definition of insiders/outsiders’; ‘youth, gender and generation’; and ‘the social construction of forgetting and remembering violence’. Each of these themes would have justified a full book in itself (and one could easily imagine an anthology just about the gendered dimensions of violence in Africa, or the role of youth and generational tensions as a cause for contemporary violence in sub-Saharan Africa). That said, each chapter has merits in its own right. Edna Bay's introductory chapter provides a brief overview of the role of the ‘gatekeeper’ state as established by the various colonial powers, and discusses how it became the main ‘prize’ in the post-colonial era. This is clearly illustrated by William Reno's chapter on the organisation of the political economy of Sierra Leone before and during the war. Similarly, Joanna Davidson's chapter on the role of stranger/native (migrant/host) relations in Guinea-Bissau is important for our understanding of the local dimensions of conflicts, not only in Guinea-Bissau but also in other conflict zones in the West African region.

In the introduction, Bay summarises the main discourses on youth, once believed to be the social category that would bring modernity to Africa's young states, but which more recently has been perceived more as a danger and a threat (p. 10). Bay then introduces the reader to the third theme: the construction of memory and how it is used (and misused) to deal with histories of violence. The extent to which the victorious party tries to construct memories of past violence is then illustrated in the three final chapters of the book, which focus on three different cases. First, the 1986 Alexander rebellion in Johannesburg, and how the Truth and Reconciliation Commission interpreted the events and personal accounts in line with the dominant ANC version of the historical events and its struggle. Second, the role of the war veterans in the recent ZANU (PF) orchestrated violence in Zimbabwe and the party's attempts to introduce a discourse of violent patriotism, conveniently bypassing the violence it had inflicted on the ZIPRA veterans in the 1980s. Third, the attempts of the RPF government in post-genocide Rwanda to promote the government's official version of Rwanda's history, which aims to create a shared identity based on Rwandan citizenship rather than ethnicity, while overriding much more subtle interpretations and understandings of identity that are present in genocide-affected communities.

The chapters on the violence of the RUF in Sierra Leone and ganging practices in South Africa in the ‘youth, gender and generation’ theme offer interesting reading material. The former piece clearly embeds the violence of Sierra Leone's atrocious war within an on-going and recurring generational struggle, while the latter contribution provides a rich ethnographic account of the role of gangs in townships and how these are changing over time. But it is the chapter on violent youth vigilantism in Nigeria that probably best illustrates the current crisis of youth in sub-Saharan Africa, and how this can give rise to violence and armed conflict. Daniel Jordan Smith states that youth ‘have been disappointed both by patron-clientism and by the mechanisms of the neoliberal state’ (p. 129). Smith presents the case of the Bakassi Boys, first immensely popular as ‘incorruptible crime fighters’ but then discredited after political elites were nevertheless able to corrupt them. It becomes clear that as long as this crisis of youth is not addressed properly, there will always be States of Violence in Africa.