The principal message of Catherine Boone’s award-winning book is that land and the regimes that govern access to it must be squarely at the center of the analysis of political phenomena—chief among them ethnicity, conflict, and the dynamics of electoral politics—that are of great interest to political scientists working on sub-Saharan Africa. While Boone takes increasing scarcity of land, a crucially important resource for the majority of Africans in many settings, to be the key driver behind heightened land-related conflict, hers is not a simplistic Malthusian argument. On the contrary, her book is centrally concerned with recognizing and explaining how land pressure produces highly varied political outcomes.

In most African settings access to land is not governed through the “apolitical” mechanisms of private property and the market. This makes the institutional shape of political authority over land especially consequential. Boone distinguishes two principal ways in which such authority is structured: statist land tenure regimes (LTRs), in which agents of the central state exercise direct authority over the allocation of land; and neo-customary regimes, in which “traditional” elites—in particular chiefs, but also lineage heads and elders (these distinctions generate three regime sub-types)—are at least cast as operating with a degree of autonomy from the central state. This overarching binary distinction notwithstanding, Boone importantly also shows that far from standing apart from the modern state and “surviving” as a residual holdover, “customary” authority is in fact intricately enmeshed with the state.

Part II of the book focuses on how LTRs shape the way ethnicity intersects with land-related conflict in areas of significant in-migration. Chapters 4 and 5 develop a contrast between three cases of neo-customary LTRs (Western Burkina Faso, and Ghana’s Ashanti and Western Region) and three cases of statist LTRs (Cote d’Ivoire’s Southwest and Center-West, Kenya’s Rift, the DRC’s Kivus). By virtue of their shared history of customary rule over ethnic territories that fused land rights to ethnicity, in both sets of cases land conflict prominently takes ethnic guises (p. 91).

But, argues Boone, differences in the institutional shape of LTRs also produce important variance. Neo-customary LTRs typically see the central state back indigenous populations over migrants, with the reverse being the case in statist regimes (p. 73). Also, and again in contrast to statist regimes, in neocustomary LTRs conflict over land tends to remain “bottled up” within the “ethnic homelands” that are neocustomary regimes’ basic building blocks and within which migrants’ political options are structurally curtailed. By implication, while “ethnic insiders vs. ethnic outsiders” is the main line of conflict in both LTR types, this line tends to structure national-level political conflict around land only in statist regimes.

Boone is careful in qualifying some of these predictions, for instance noting that the state tends to back migrants in statist LTRs only as long as migrants remain the incumbent’s clients (p. 74). This if-clause then explains Bédié’s “about-face” (p. 276) on the issue of migrants’ rights in Cote d’Ivoire and Moi’s switching sides in Kenya (pp. 156, 262). Likewise covered are Mobutu’s reversal on the Banyarwanda with the 1981 citizenship law and the ensuing concessions to “indigeneity” (pp. 290–1), his possible re-reversal in 1994 (294), and his final re-re-reversal in 1995–1996. But as I read this case material, I do begin to wonder how predictive statist LTRs then really are if their supposed effect is so dependent on the stability of apparently highly changeable and contingent patron-client relations. In Mobutu’s case in particular, the hypothesized institutional effect just seems to be obliterated as “all else” stubbornly refuses to be “equal” for more than a few years at a time.

Part III pays particular attention to the question of “correspondence between the scale of land-allocation authority and the scale and shape of land-related conflict” (p. 179). When, as in Kenya’s Kisii region, authority over land is exercised at the micro-level of families and small lineages, land-related conflict is expected to stay at this level and take neither ethnic nor overtly political form, at least in the absence of in-migration (Chapter 6). Rwanda sits at the opposite end of the spectrum: access to land is centered on the authority of the central state and conflict has correspondingly scaled up and heightened (Chapter 8). Northern Cameroon and Ghana’s Ashanti region occupy the middle ground. Neo-customary authority is expected to focus conflict at the sub-national level and effectively curtail in-migrants’ options and ability to pursue their interests in the national-level arena (Chapter 7). While the general argument makes a lot of sense, Kisii’s generationally structured, national-level conflict, which appears at least in part land-related (pp. 195–8, pace 259), suggests that LTRs perhaps do not constrain politics quite as tightly as proposed. I would draw the same lesson from contestation of chiefly authority over land in Ghana, which—in arguing that it became a significant factor in the coup against Nkrumah (pp. 111, 218)—Boone does find making the jump to the national level. (Boone, by contrast, prefers to stick to her argument that LTRs are predictive of the scale of conflict when she casts this case as an “anomaly” [p. 122] that ultimately does not challenge the central tendency.)

Part IV probes the effect of the opening of political competition as competitive electoral politics made a comeback in the 1990s. Boone’s four cases of statist LTRs illustrate that they especially tend to interact with electoral politics by way of heightening conflict over land (Chapter 9). Similar dynamics are traced in Zimbabwe (Chapter 10).

Boone’s account is strongest where its detailed case-focussed narrative explores the salience of land and the intricacies of its enmeshment in politics. Even country specialists will appreciate the longitudinal picture she assembles of land’s central role in her cases’ political history, and her account will serve as an invaluable reference and guide. But, in aiming for “structuralist generalization” (p. 61), the book seeks to go beyond loose analytical case-narratives. Boone is admirably and uncommonly forthright when she acknowledges that this endeavour involves choices and trade-offs. Causal generalization about LTRs demands that they be rendered comparable by ordering them into distinct types, each presumed to exert a distinctive causal force. Thus, she opts “for a theoretical model that makes it possible to compare structural attributes of local settings as they vary across space,” “sacrificing” a “more processual and less structural conceptualization of African land regimes” (p. 64). In turn, this model implies that Boone must part ways with “some highly informed analysts [who] have argued that African land regimes differ so much and so intricately that each can be thought of as sui generis” (p. 72).

These interlocking choices are of course forced by conventional political science’s disciplinary imperatives of generating covering-law like generalizations by way of parsing history into antecedent conditions and outcomes and devising categories/measures that render the world of these variables comparable. My own book explicitly eschews this goal as well as the mechanistic model of causality and the comparative measuring of variables that are attached to it, advocating instead a processual understanding of “causality” and an embrace of contingency and idiosyncrasy.

A partisan, I am therefore predictably sceptical of the coding of cases into two distinctive types of LTRs that underlies Boone’s causal claims. Although in the DRC’s North Kivu chiefs exercised extensive authority over the majority of the land, including in areas where Banyarwanda migrants settled (pp. 289, 291, 293), the province is treated as statist because “chieftaincy … serve[d] the purposes of the central state” (p. 286). Boone's treatment of the southwestern Ivoirian case is nuanced: she calls it (only) “essentially statist” (pp. 129, 134), in acknowledgment of local authorities' considerable authority over land (pp. 132–3). Nonetheless, the label is applied because local authorities were subject to pressure from central government to make “unused” land available to migrants. Central government pressure is, however, a characteristic that these “statist” cases share with most neo-customary regimes at least to some extent. Thus, in “neo-customary” Western Ghana (pp. 122–3) and Northern Cameroon (pp. 203, 206) overall perhaps stronger chiefs still also had to give in to similar pressures, raising the question whether one is really dealing with a categorical distinction in kind vis-á-vis the southwestern Ivorian case and North Kivu. To my eyes, this is a picture of hybridity, multi-dimensionality, idiosyncrasy, and fluidity—a reality, in short, that does not fit into the overarching binary fixity that many of the book’s arguments about LTRs hinge upon.

Measurement aside, can LTRs in fact be treated as antecedent to and independent of Boone’s explananda? In neither Kenya’s Rift nor “revolutionary” Rwanda did the decisive move toward “statism” in land allocation happen independently of or prior to the structuration of the political sphere into nationally-constituted categorical adversaries (directly pertaining to the “dependent variables” of scale and form of conflict). The very actions that turned these LTRs so statist were inextricably bound up with these already existing dynamics. That land-related conflict in these cases then remained especially prominent, nationalized, and pernicious, especially around election times, seems not so much a function of the institutional shape of their LTRs than the fact that the central state exercised explicit categorical favouritism, part of which was its handling of questions of land.

This suggests that the language of institutional/structural causation is in fact misleading. The crucial story seems to be that when the central state takes partisan action in land matters along categorical lines, land conflict is likely to fester perniciously at the national level, especially when there are political openings (Boone sometimes seems to come close to this reading, e.g., p. 285). This formulation might also help to make sense of a crucial case, not discussed at length, that appears to run counter to the book’s argument. The complete reordering of land tenure relations effected by villagization in Tanzania must surely qualify the country as a statist LTR par excellence. Yet land-related conflict has not dominated electoral politics nor produced violent ethnic conflagrations. Why? Because the Tanzanian state’s actions did not create winners and losers along categorical lines. (Boone seems to agree [p. 318].)

A grudging concession to billiards-metaphors: rather than as cue balls, we might think of LTRs as always already in play. They affect the game through their interactions with the complex eco-system they form with other balls (ethnicity, electoral politics, scale of conflict), not through some “independent” actions on them. And while certain types of interactions are more likely than others by virtue of the balls’ positioning and movement vis-à-vis one another, this space of possibility is rarely tightly constrained. This “model” learns from Boone the important insight that LTRs are a key element of the political game. But it avoids the questionable move of attributing to them the causal force of an “independent variable.”