In this significant contribution to postcolonial African political studies, Mike McGovern assumes the challenge of explaining a negative: why do people choose not to go to war, when neighbors facing similar societal fractures have engaged in extensive intracommunal violence? This question is especially fraught in the Mano River region of West Africa, where Liberia, Sierra Leone, and Côte d’Ivoire were torn apart by brutal internal conflicts, while Guinea experienced ethnically based massacres but avoided widespread ethnic cleansing and civil war. In his search for answers, McGovern homes in on a pivotal six-month period in 2000 to 2001 in Guinea’s forest region, where ethnic polarization, scarcity of resources, and episodic violence might have led to civil war, but did not.

McGovern’s conclusion stands received wisdom on its head. While acknowledging the brutality of Sékou Touré’s postindependence regime (1958–1984), McGovern rejects the common scholarly view that reduces Guinea’s socialist nation-building project to an exercise in repression and challenges the oft-stated claim that democracy, rather than state socialism, is the best way to maintain peace. Instead, he argues that the promises and optimism of the postindependence socialist state, the willingness of Guineans to sacrifice for a common national good, and the sense of national identity and unity that was forged by state practices and policies endured for three decades after Sékou Touré’s death. During the period of military rule (1984–2010), it was the socialist state’s culture and discourse that gave Guineans the tools they needed to avoid the civil wars that plagued their neighbors—and which were far more destructive than the state violence of the Touré regime.

Nuanced, complex, and undeterred by controversy, McGovern’s book highlights the views and experiences of ordinary Guineans who lived during the socialist period. Rooted in thirty-five months of research in Guinea, conducted between 1997 and 2013, it does not gloss over harsh realities, but rather, explores the paradoxes and contradictions of the state’s lofty promises and flawed results. For instance, in its drive to build a nation from an ethnically diverse population, the state attempted to enforce a unitary identity by homogenizing disparate cultures. In so doing, it promoted stereotypes of “backward” and forward-looking ethnic groups, sharpening divisions between them. The privileged treatment of some over others sparked violence against those who failed to conform and resistance by those who were belittled and dominated. The ride was rough, but the outcome was a sense of national identity and belonging.

The peace, however, was both fragile and imperfect, and the possibility of succumbing to violence was ever-present. After Touré’s death, political, economic, and social stresses resulted in ethnic massacres and led Guinea to the brink of civil war. However, the Guinean people stepped back, hearkening to a sense of common national identity that eluded their neighbors. The socialist rhetoric and policies of the Touré years produced a “social resiliency” that prevented civil war (14). These habits of mind and practice influenced even the large majority of Guineans who were born or came of age after the socialist experiment ended. Contrary to the trope of rebellious youth who reject their elders’ values, Guinean youth and young adults continued to revere many of the socialist state’s perspectives and behaviors. As a result, socialist optimism endured through decades of post-socialist rule—despite the fact that subsequent rulers did little to cultivate it.

As McGovern’s 2000–2001 case study demonstrates, political actors and profiteers who might have benefited from war failed to ignite a response within the local population that would have propelled the country toward civil war. Instead, while some in Guinea’s forest region considered ethnic cleansing, they chose against it because of the “durable national dispositions” put in place during the Touré years and which long outlasted it (28). Although the strength of Touré’s legacy diminished over time, it nonetheless remained at the core of Guinean moral attitudes and practices. “Narratives of betrayal” did not take root, and retaliatory killings were delegitimized. Instead, the narrative that “we are all Guineans” prevailed (119). Would-be ethnic cleansers and rebel insurgents found little support among the local population, which held to the values imbibed in the slogans, rallies, and cultural festivals of the socialist era. National unity, rather than ethnic scapegoating, they concluded, was the best way to protect their families and themselves. The ethnically mixed civilian defense networks that guarded their communities bore a strong resemblance to the ethnically mixed teams of anticolonial mobilizers of the 1950s and to similar education, work, and cultural brigades of the postindependence era.

McGovern concludes with two brief case studies that focus on more recent periods of social stress: the general strikes, mass demonstrations, and brutal state repression of 2006–2007 and the final years of military rule in 2008–2009. Despite recurrences of ethnic chauvinism, the legacy of socialist values endured. Guineans continued to cling to a delicate peace and to the optimistic hope, bred by socialist ideals, that unity, even in poverty and suffering, would ultimately lead to a better life.