Land remains a politically explosive issue in southern Africa, and one that former liberation movements turned (dominant) governing parties ignore at their peril. This book seeks to answer two key questions. First, why have the social, political and economic consequences of attempts to resolve the legacy of dispossession and racially skewed distributions of land varied so greatly across the region? Second, what does the future hold for socio-economic development and democratic consolidation in southern Africa?

The book comprises a three-country comparative case study of post-colonial Zimbabwe, South Africa and Namibia. It examines the already well-researched meltdown in Zimbabwe triggered by the land invasions of 2000–3, the South African impasse where an even more extremely skewed distribution of land has been tackled gradually by legal means and through appropriate channels, and the ambivalent situation in Namibia, where increasingly radical pronouncements by government officials, including the public support of former President Nujoma for Mugabe's policies in Zimbabwe, went hand-in-hand with pragmatic policies largely respectful of due process. Botswana, which lacks a history of significant settler colonialism and dispossession, and Mozambique, which made a clear break from its settler legacy following the post-independence exodus of the Portuguese minority, are utilised as ‘control cases’ throughout the study. The latter two examples illustrate socio-political dynamics where the emotive issue of land is absent and where governing parties did not fight a war of liberation (Botswana), or no longer confront a former settler minority still in control of a significant amount of land (Mozambique), and where, consequently, land does not occupy a central and potentially destabilising place in national politics.

The case selection is helpful because these countries offer significant variation in outcomes which allows the authors to address a number of important questions. Why, for instance, did a violent history of farm labour relations and a highly skewed distribution of land in South Africa not lead to the same degree of confrontation, including widespread invasions and the outright dispossession of white commercial farmers, as in Zimbabwe? This question has implications not only for land-ownership, but also for wider (international) assessments of the region's potential to realise democratic consolidation, to establish itself as a safe destination for investment, and hence to achieve broad-based development. However, the comparison could have been further strengthened by fully incorporating one of the control cases; by according Botswana a chapter of its own, the authors would have been better able to illustrate the consequences of not having to manage an unresolved legacy of dispossession.

The introductory chapter provides a lucid and accessible overview of southern Africa's political economy, setting the stage for the subsequent analysis of land reform. The discussion of the role of political discourses concerning the crucial importance of land in the struggles for liberation provides a novel angle through which to discuss the region's challenges. However, while readable and helpful to anyone looking for an introduction to the politics of land in southern Africa, the book has seemingly been edited in haste. There are problems throughout the text, with syntactical errors and the omission of words occurring too frequently. The reference to ‘student appraisals’ (instead of ‘uprisings’, p. 84) is but one example of editorial oversight which detracts from an otherwise professional analysis.

The main strength of this book is the combination of Alden's (an international relations scholar) political analysis with Anseeuw's (an agricultural economist) insights into the economics of land reform, providing a novel approach to questions that have not yet been resolved despite their extensive treatment in the literature, and which constitute an enduring threat to democratic consolidation and development. The emphasis on political discourses, for example the importance of land for the liberation struggle rhetoric that ZANU-PF, SWAPO and, to a lesser extent, the ANC continually reference when claiming a legitimate right to rule, and the inclusion of the intermediate case of Namibia, which typically receives much less attention in the literature than do Zimbabwe and South Africa, represent particularly valuable contributions.