In this much-anticipated sequel to his magisterial African Colonial State in Comparative Perspective (1994), Crawford Young charts the trials and tribulations of postcolonial state formation over the past fifty years. The analysis pivots on the claim that the crisis of state legitimacy of the 1980s marked a critical juncture in the life of the postcolonial state: it separates the first moment from independence through the 1980s of broadly parallel itineraries in state formation, and the second moment since of widely divergent state itineraries. The analysis unfolds in three parts.

The first, with two chapters, elaborates the book's conceptual framework. Chapter One lays out a six-fold periodization of the evolution of the postcolonial state, along with three dominant modes (optimism, pessimism, and mixture of both) that modulated commentary on postcolonial African politics at various junctures. The next chapter specifies six key behavioral attributes of states (quest for hegemony, security, legitimacy, revenue, accumulation, and autonomy) and three normative (developmental, integral, and liberalized) models of states that have guided evaluation of the efficaciousness of the state-making enterprise at different points. The four chapters of Part Two detail the dynamics of state building through three cycles of hope and disillusionment. Chapter Three recounts the launching of the postcolonial state. Despite variance in pathways to independence, a set of circumstances ensured a high degree of uniformity in infant postcolonial states. Prominent was the ‘code of decolonization’ that partly held sovereignty and territoriality as sacrosanct. Relieved of fears of external challenges to their territories, ruling elites’ attention focused on competition for power and social control. The ‘colonial bureaucratic authoritarian state’ was reinforced as the primary source of power, establishing ‘bureaucratic authoritarianism’ as the essence of postcolonial states over the next three decades. Chapter Four covers the journey from the 1960s through the 1980s, a period when the optimism of independence quickly faded into disappointment as patrimonial autocracy became the ubiquitous regime type. Chapter Five probes how the excesses of the ‘integral state project’, pursued with vigor from the 1970s, fueled the conjoined crisis of economies and state legitimacy. By the close of the 1980s, the rapaciousness of patrimonial autocracies had rendered state failure and state collapse the defining future of Africa's political landscape. Chapter Six examines the confluence of domestic and global circumstances for the emergence of liberal constitutional polity as the new normative state and uses five regime types (democratic, semi-democratic, autocratic, transitional, and failed) that have resulted from the return to multiparty elections in the 1990s, to explicate the ensuing diversification of state itineraries.

Chapter Seven (the last of two substantive chapters of Part Three) deals with the changing nature of organized political violence since the decolonization era. Young shares the Africanist consensus that the spiral of deadly conflict and civil wars since the 1980s has been debilitating for state-formation. Chapter Eight explores the role of ideologies and intersecting identities on shifting patterns of political organization and competition. Notable is the chiding of many who dismiss African nationalism as shallow; this is belied by evidence of the robust ‘naturalization of territorial nationalism’ (p. 300). The concluding chapter uses the six behavioral attributes of states enumerated in Chapter Three to compare the performance of African postcolonial states against non-African counterparts and comments on the premises of the present competing sentiments of hope and cynicism about the African prospect.

The building blocks of the narrative that orient this analysis of the journey of African postcolonial state are familiar; this is hardly surprising given Young's profound influence in shaping the dominant narrative at critical junctures of the journey. With his characteristic theoretical eclecticism and narrative flair, he has marshaled his encyclopedic knowledge of modern African history to gift us with a thought-provoking tour de force that is destined to become a classic. Young's prolonged scholarly engagement with the continent has been guided by unwavering empathy with the aspirations of its peoples for better, more just societies. The book's final paragraph bears witness to the noble sentiment that permeates it:

The study of African politics will continue to be enriched if practitioners pay homage to the erudition and the nobility of spirit that has anchored the engagement of this most esteemed doyen of Africanists with the continent.