Neoliberal Frontiers documents recent shifts in the workings of the Ghanaian state through an in-depth portrait of a single government agency, the Customs, Excise and Preventive Service (CEPS). Combining insights from political economy with ethnographic fieldwork conducted in three key border zones – the Aflao border, the harbour at Tema and Accra's Kotoka International Airport – Chalfin aims to offer ‘a fully anthropological theorization of the state attuned to how the prescribed modalities of neoliberal governance are constituted and struggled over in practice’ (p. 10).

Despite its ostensibly peripheral status, the CEPS emerges as a vital pillar of the Ghanaian state apparatus, generating close to half of all government revenue and playing a critical role in monitoring the movement of people and things across national borders. Bolder still is Chalfin's suggestion that its significance has actually been augmented by recent economic and political reforms, implemented at the behest of the IMF, the World Bank and the WTO and geared towards promoting private enterprise and economic liberalisation. Far from undermining state institutions or eroding national boundaries, Chalfin argues, such interventions (glossed here as ‘neoliberal’) have served to revitalise the state, while at the same time reconfiguring the way state power is exercised.

A key strength of this book is its effort to situate recent trends in historical perspective. In Chapter 1 (‘Customs as Effective Sovereign’), for example, Chalfin traces a genealogy of the Ghanaian customs service from the early colonial period onwards, arguing that the wide-ranging functions assumed by colonial customs authorities (and their vital role in raising revenue) gave rise to a distinctive form of ‘fiscal-bureaucratic’ sovereignty. She suggests that this historical legacy dovetails neatly with the ‘neoliberal vision of government minimus, consolidating a broad regulatory reach within a single state apparatus’ (p. 230). This makes Ghana fertile ground for neoliberal processes of ‘exchange and experimentation’ (p. 227).

A focus on the longue durée may, however, undermine the importance that Chalfin attributes to the ‘neoliberal turn’. In several places, her material suggests that reforms have been implemented only where they serve to protect state interests; in other instances, they have been manipulated, retooled or simply ignored. This highly selective adoption of reform undermines the claims that Neoliberal Frontiers makes for the coherence of the neoliberal project. It also suggests continuities with older traditions of state building in West Africa. What Chalfin characterises as a neoliberal ‘revival of customs’ may be no more than the government's latest ruse to protect its principal revenue stream without offering any guarantees of accountability in return.

Chalfin is on firmer ground when she explores the ways in which the state is entangled in everyday social life. Customs emerges as a critical site of struggle for economic survival and social recognition for public officials and ‘private users’ alike, with work for the CEPS considered by many Ghanaians as an ‘express lane to modern affluence’ (p. 211). The ethnographic material from the Aflao border in Chapter 3 demonstrates clearly that customs officers are subject to the wider political economy of the borderland – anyone who has ever witnessed the sheer dynamism (and apparent chaos!) at Aflao cannot fail to recognise Chalfin's colourful portrait of female smugglers ‘in a state of “economic” undress’ (p. 67). Her fieldwork at Kotoka International Airport points in a similar direction, suggesting that the implementation of neoliberal reform here has been fundamentally shaped by the social tensions, rivalries and aspirations generated by Ghana's ‘economics of exodus’ (p. 201).

Once again, however, the danger is that these dynamics are seen as coextensive with the ‘neoliberal moment’ rather than as continuous with a long history of popular struggle for economic survival and uneasy accommodation with an often-predatory state. The spectre of an all-encompassing neoliberal project haunts the Conclusion, where Chalfin discusses the ‘neoliberalization of everyday life’ (p. 237). This is surely a step too far. Neoliberal Frontiers is a welcome contribution to the literature on contemporary governance in Africa and an important call to take seriously the character of recent political and economic reforms. Ultimately, however, Chalfin's claim that what is happening in Ghana today is a result of the ‘systematic and systemic effects’ (p. 230) of neoliberalism is not convincing.