Kidane Mengisteab puts his finger on one of the key challenges of my analysis. He writes, “The region’s populations are not submissive to the scourge of the political elite.” That is correct; they often diagnose the ills with perspicacity, and demand change. It is also correct that my book focuses on the elite and not on wider society and popular movements.

It is important to emphasize that the thesis of the political marketplace does not require that all politicians are enslaved to material incentives. Rather, it is a hypothesis that political projects are subject to the laws of the political market: They survive or fail on the basis of its iron logic. Also, it is a historically specific phenomenon: Kidane is right to point out that many of the leaders of the region (Eritrea and Ethiopia are clear cases) came to power through other political logics (especially force) and only later consolidated their rule as political business ventures.

The challenge is to deal with the peculiar contemporary configuration that confronts us. Kidane cites some fine examples of popular resistance. But these belong in the now-defunct modernist era of the 1960s and 1970s. Recent episodes, such as the Arab Spring, suggest that a people’s uprising against a dictator is less likely to result in democracy than a violent political marketplace, either deregulated (Libya) or oligopolistic (Egypt). Political economies in Africa today—as in Europe and North America—simply do not fit along any democratic-authoritarian linearity any longer, just as the terms “left” and “right” and the associated political parties are anachronistic.

Kidane’s challenge warrants close scrutiny. What political logic might challenge a political marketplace? This logic need not be democratic—it could be nationalist-militarist or moral populist (i.e., appealing to exclusionary sentiments, drawing on a cultural repertoire including identity, faith, and other spiritual solidarities). We certainly see all of these at play in northeast Africa, with many of their leaders trying to manipulate these sentiments for their own advancement, but sometimes unleashing forces they cannot control.

A political market can evolve in a different direction to oligarchy, namely, toward more open competition; this has the potential of shifting the most effective forms of political mobilization from violence to nonviolence. This, I suspect, will be the most effective form of resistance: mobilizing the strengths of the political marketplace logic itself to defang it of its most violent and repressive tendencies.

Within a political market system, we can also see examples of individuals and groups who seek, with some success, to create islands of humanity. There are numerous civil servants, judges and lawyers, and civil society activists who act with immense personal integrity. They possess many of the same skills and capacities as the political entrepreneurs whom they challenge, but bend them to a different end. A political ethics of virtue—something repeatedly stressed by indigenous political renewal movements—may contribute the most enduring opportunity for transforming the political marketplaces of the Horn of Africa.