As this century began, Angola was a synonym for intractable conflict. Less than a decade later, as oil prices boomed, it had become a synonym for unsustainable economic growth. Ricardo Soares de Oliveira's book is the first to analyse the implications of Angola's extraordinary transformation during the last fifteen years. The difficulty of pinning the book down into any one discipline is a tribute to the richness of its material and to the ambition of its approach.
Soares de Oliveira first considers the legacy of war that has determined Angola's path since 2002: far from bequeathing a ground zero, the conflict configured access to state resources that made possible the extreme enrichment of a small elite. The next chapter examines the ‘spectacle of reconstruction’, introducing an argument about state action as a source of partisan legitimacy. While post-war construction may have been driven by a logic of political expediency and personal enrichment, the creation of the outward signifiers of stateness serves in itself to make the state – and the party from which it is indistinguishable – a reference point for national identity.
How the MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) achieved this is documented in the third chapter, which explains how an elite that appeared in 1989 to be on the wrong side of history was able two decades later to command the resources of a potent ‘party state’. It did so by retaining the authoritarianism and economic centralism of old, while selectively adapting to the demands of a world order in which international standing would be determined by trade relations and no longer by ideological lip service. This enabled the rise of the Angolan ‘oligarchic capitalism’ analysed in the next chapter: Angolan capitalism that has little to do with risk and enterprise, and everything to do with state-endorsed resource allocation to a select few. Here in particular, the author demonstrates the value of the access that he gained to sources inside a notoriously opaque elite, using interview material to provide forensic detail of the relationship between state and capital that many studies of neo-patrimonialism take for granted. The final chapter details how a state that once appeared to be the plaything of foreign interests has crafted an assertive international role for itself in the post-Cold War world: a role that is founded in the country's function as an energy supplier and which serves to reinforce the elite's dominance inside Angola.
Soares de Oliveira's analysis of Angola's political economy is embedded within a many-layered narrative: while the Angolan state has been formed within a historical arc encompassing the Cold War and its aftermath, he demonstrates that social and economic relations are the product of a longue durée dating back to the earliest years of colonial settlement. He argues that the Angolan state's greatest achievements in the post-war era are security, contractual stability (to vouchsafe foreign investment) and gaining autonomy over its own international relations in a way that resists the imposition of any normative agenda that might challenge how the elite conducts its business (p. 136). Yet if these are the nuts and bolts of statehood that the MPLA has mastered, a further notable feature of the book is its exploration of the ideational relationship between state and society. Soares de Oliveira offers a plausible hypothesis about party-state hegemony by suggesting that it possesses a ‘monopoly over modernity’ that makes it a lodestar for aspiration (p. 115). The ubiquity of ‘state norms’ creates a ‘desire for the state’ even while few see any material benefit from it (p. 129).
That MPLA hegemony is limited soon becomes clear, although to define these limits would be beyond this book's scope. Soares de Oliveira makes clear that his perspective is that of Luanda, Angola's ‘pinnacle of modernity’ (p. 82). The further one moves from the capital, the more state building and governance become a matter of a lumbering and ignorant state imposing itself upon society: a process of state bifurcation that echoes Mamdani. Even within the state's coastal heartland, where a ‘nascent middle class’ is kept on board through its aspiration to the lifestyle of the elite, the poor see next to nothing (p. 155). In many ways, Angola's current social and political conjuncture appears as an unsustainable historical moment, the crest of a wave that may already have broken with the recent collapse of the crude oil price.
Although the granular detail of the book's analysis highlights the eccentricity of the Angolan case, its contributions to debates in comparative politics are clear. The book adds to the theorization of the ‘illiberal’ state that Soares de Oliveira has broached elsewhere: a state that uses the rewards of resource endowment to pursue a trajectory contrary to the liberal democratic norms once favoured by donors. By locating Angola's distinct path of state formation within history and political economy, Soares de Oliveira makes a strong case against the ‘empty shell’ vision of the African state guaranteed only by respect for its own borders. The extraversion of the Angolan state is structured on its own terms, and forms part of a strategy that is not simply about surviving, but about thriving.
