In Burkina Faso: A History of Power, Protest, and Revolution, Ernest Harsch provides a detailed account of the political, social and institutional history of Burkina Faso since the colonial period. It is a carefully organised account of many significant moments in Burkinabè history, and provides an excellent scaffold for readers to organise their own analysis of recent political developments in the context of historical precedent. The descriptions are greatly enhanced by the inclusion of quotes from interviews with numerous political and social activists from the past several decades.

The book is organised into 15 chapters, including an introduction and a conclusion. The introduction provides a useful overview of relations between citizens and the state from colonisation to the most recent elections in 2015. From Chapter 2 on, the chapters are arranged in approximate chronological order, beginning with a brief but important discussion of pre-colonial organisation and the hierarchical structures of groups inhabiting modern-day Burkina Faso.

Chapter 3 discusses early post-colonial governments, beginning with Maurice Yaméogo's independence government and its cession of leadership to Sangoulé Lamizana's military government in 1966. This chapter introduces readers to the complicated relationship between the military and political leadership throughout Burkina's history, continuing through the 1980 and 1982 coups and into Chapter 4. For those interested in the leadership of Thomas Sankara and his role as a revolutionary role model, Chapters 5–8 provide a well-balanced and thoughtful discussion of Sankara's early political involvement, his efforts to build a national identity (with a specific note on the linguistic origins of Burkina Faso and the name for its people, Burkinabè), and the successes and failures of his short-lived regime. Harsch takes pains to discuss successes while also providing examples of the regime's more authoritarian tendencies, providing a nuanced understanding of Sankara's legacy.

Chapters 9 and 10 discuss the rise of Blaise Compaoré's regime, with attention to the economic evolution of the 1990s that helped contribute to the enrichment of political elites and the personalisation of power around Compaoré and his family. Chapters 11 and 12 focus on the pressures for reform both from within the state apparatus and from citizens in the streets, particularly after the highly publicised murder of a journalist, Norbert Zongo, in 1998. Finally, Chapters 13–15 discuss more recent political events, from the protests surrounding Compaoré's efforts to override a constitutional limit on presidential terms to the popular insurrection that led to the collapse of his regime in 2014 and his subsequent exile. These chapters examine the continued influence of the military, the failed attempt at a coup in 2015, the transition and democratic elections, and conclude with a brief discussion of the Roch Marc Christian Kaboré government's progress.

This book is an excellent resource for those interested in understanding more about Burkina Faso's history, and it is one of the best resources to date in English. One area where this book could have elaborated a bit more is on Burkina Faso's relative ability to avoid some of the struggles, such as ethnic conflict and electoral violence, that have plagued its neighbours. While Harsch draws attention to the relative absence of such problems in Burkina, he does not offer any potential explanation for these differences. On the whole, this book is tremendously informative, and a long overdue resource for those interested in understanding one of Africa's least-studied countries.