In this richly detailed study, Carolyn E. Holmes explores the challenges that postconflict societies face when navigating the at-times conflicting imperatives of nation-building and institutionalizing democratic competition. She asks, How do societies recover from deep wounds and rebuild, and what does it mean to build democracy, government, and the nation all at the same time? Do these processes move in tandem, or might the demands of one undermine the necessary conditions for the other? Holmes explores these issues through an in-depth case study of post-apartheid South Africa, examining how the process of building a sense of cohesive national identity has been at times thwarted by the competition of the democratic process. In this book, she highlights a fundamental contradiction: whereas democracies require and depend on institutionalized competition in regulated fights for power, nation-building requires that national communities generate a sense of underlying commonality to bind them together. The problem, she argues, is that the process of institutionalizing competition can undermine the generation of the necessary sense of community (nation-building) that is necessary for postconflict reconciliation and recovery.

Holmes locates her inquiry within several intellectual traditions: postconflict peacebuilding, nation-building, nationalism studies, democratization and democratic institution building, state-building, and reconciliation. She identifies the intersections among these fields and carefully points out how the various processes influence each other, both in supporting and contradictory ways. The book is ambitious in its framing and delivers a complex and nuanced analysis of how these dynamics have played out in South Africa since 1994.

This book’s core strength is its rich, highly contextual analysis of how individuals in post-apartheid South Africa have constructed their identities and how that construction has in turn been influenced by the changing political system, particularly the demands of democratization. Holmes skillfully uses both historical and ethnographic methods to contribute to contemporary political science’s disciplinary debates about the tensions between peacebuilding, state-building, and democratization. She presents a detailed analysis of post-apartheid political and social contexts, adopting an anthropological approach to the collection, organization, analysis, and presentation of information. When organizing the volume, for example, she lets the data speak for itself, determining how to structure the book’s chapters based on what was revealed by her interviewees about how they see the world. In this way, she allows South Africans to lead the way in identifying the core factors that have shaped their processes of identity construction.

Holmes’s ultimate argument—that the democratization process in South Africa has stymied broad attempts at national reconciliation and nation-building as an outcome of the ways that political parties have gone about mobilizing electoral constituencies—is not new. This, as Holmes herself discusses, is an insight that has emerged from a range of prior scholarship on South Africa specifically, and in broader theoretical debates within the fields of democracy and democratization, ethnic politics, and nationalism studies. Holmes’s argument for why and how this outcome has arisen, however, is both novel and carefully argued. Rather than rely on the common macrolevel structural features prominent in mainstream political science—the structure of the party system, incentives established by national political institutions, and the nature of the country’s social demographics—Holmes focuses on microfoundations: the cumulative impact of millions of individual acts of constructive creation as South Africans go about their daily lives.

In this manner, Holmes demonstrates how many aspects of the post-apartheid system have led to the continued reification of the old cleavages entrenched during apartheid, rather than breaking through them to refashion South Africa into a well-integrated multicultural society. She identifies a set of dynamics that have created these outcomes: the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the impact of national symbolic frames like the Rainbow Nation metaphor, the politics of ownership and access to place and public spaces, how celebrations and remembrances develop a national symbolic repertoire, and how political contestation emphasizes difference in a way that undermines the generation of a sense of commonality. In each of these contexts microprocesses of identity construction emphasize and reinforce difference, rather than eroding barriers between groups. Ultimately, her main contribution is a demonstration of how “constitutive causality”—the ways that actors and contexts create and re-create interdependent codes of meaning that in turn shape their individual, group, and national identities—shaped by the competing demands of democratization and nation-building—have led to a South Africa that, for the vast segments of the population, is as deeply divided today as in the past (pp. 190–91).

Holmes offers a way to bridge macro- and mesolevel processes with their micropolitical underpinnings. She offers clear warnings about the tensions between nation-building and democratization in the context of postconflict recovery in deeply divided societies. The writing is clear and articulate, and Holmes successfully integrates the concepts of positionality, practice, and ethnography into a macropolitical framework that will be understandable to mainstream political scientists. Her findings will ring true to South Africa specialists as well, and perhaps the deepest strength of this work is the empirical material, with its detailed descriptions of how South Africans understand the world and what shapes it. Holmes’s approach is highly ethnographic, drawing from detailed interviews with more than 100 Afrikaners and Zulu persons (identified by home language—Afrikaans and isiZulu) in Bloemfontein and Durban, complemented by the participatory observation gained by living in South Africa for several years.

Although the book has many strengths, I am left wondering whether Holmes fully accomplishes what she sets out to do in the work. She frames the research as an exploration of the disconnects and tension between the competition of a new democratic system and nation-building. However, she does not demonstrate (nor does she claim to) a causal dynamic here. Rather, she presents parallel information—theoretical discussions of how the competitiveness and institutionalized competition of a democratic system can undermine the project of nation-building—set next to discussions and evidence about how and why nation-building in South Africa has stalled since 1994. Neither does the book claim to show how the lack of nation-building is inhibiting postconflict recovery in South Africa, which is puzzling because of the significant emphasis on this theme in the setup and conclusion of the inquiry.

Similarly, the explanation of the enduring and possibly deepening cleavages is only partially tied to politics: of the arenas she investigates, two are explicitly political, and one is tied to party competition. The remaining dynamics are those that manifest in quotidian arenas: the delimitation of and access to public spaces, participation in festivals and rituals, mono- and multilingualism, and the dynamics of cultural celebrations and historical remembrances. Although these arenas are at times political, they are not explicitly linked to democratic politics in the volume, which undermines the emphasis on the tension created by the demands of institutionalized competition. In a way, Holmes has undersold the true contribution of her research in an effort to link it to higher-order political science debates. Holmes’s analysis focuses on much more than the democratic process in explaining the entrenchment of social cleavages in the post-apartheid era, and rightfully so. In this sense, Holmes’s work is excellent at what it does do and less convincing about what it claims to do, which leads this reviewer to offer that the core tension of the book is perhaps overplayed. The strength of this work is not how it addresses the larger debates in political science about the problems for postconflict recovery that are caused by democratic competition (what the book claims it does). Instead, its true strength is one of approach and research methods, specifically in showing how the anthropological approach can unearth the microfoundations and everyday processes that perpetuate social divisions, despite attempts to reduce them. The end result is a richly detailed examination of South African society and politics since 1994, one that can offer methodological insights to political scientists and a useful analysis of South Africa to area specialists.