Angola is a country of contrasts. Cost of living surveys regularly declare that Luanda, the capital, is the most expensive city in the world, yet the average per capita income is US$4500 per year. The government does not officially recognise any religion other than Christianity, but apparently tolerates transsexuals without issue – judging by the popularity of the kuduro artist, Titica. The country desperately needs affordable housing, but most of the public purse has been spent rebuilding the bay of Luanda or hiring ‘starchitects’ to design iconic buildings for the wealthy.

Ricardo Soares de Oliveira's (hereinafter RSO) masterful account of Angola's political economy tries to explain these puzzling dichotomies. Written for a general readership, but invaluable for scholars, the book examines the efforts by Angola's authoritarian regime to rebuild the state and reconstruct the economy since the end of the civil war. At independence from Portugal in 1975, the newly established MPLA (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola) government became embroiled for nearly thirty years in a destructive civil conflict. Financed by resource revenues and influenced by Cold War dynamics, the conflict decimated the countryside, halted developmental project and undercut initiatives to build nationalism. Over time, it provided a convenient excuse for the ruling party and the President, José Eduardo dos Santos, to rely on draconian measures to stay in power. When the Angolan armed forces killed the leader of the rebel movement, Jonas Savimbi, in 2002, the war ended with an unequivocal victory for the government.

That decisive victory provides the starting point for RSO's candid appraisal of the regime's mission to retain political hegemony and sustain access to lucrative resource rents by refashioning postwar Angola. Extensive road building and the provision of social housing suggest a commitment to public works, but as RSO emphasises, this is a ‘potemkin reconstruction’ (p. 87). The poor are all but neglected. Taking advantage of the recent boom in oil prices, the state directs its largesse at an exclusive band of elites who surround the President and his family; serve in the military; and occupy top positions in the national oil company, Sonangol. They are politicians, generals, entrepreneurs and consultants, who legitimate the Leviathan in return for high-rise luxury apartments and numerous get-rich-quick business opportunities.

Owing to the scarcity of any substantial productive activities besides oil extraction, the state also manufactures and pacifies the ‘middle class’. It expands civil service positions to accommodate demands for jobs, subsidises the cost of homeownership for a selective few, and maintains some level of macro-economic stabilisation to neutralise discontent. The regime completes the coalition by stitching together an assortment of business and political partners from Brazil to Israel.

In many ways, this is a familiar narrative about war, dictators, inequality and the resource curse in Africa. It could be told about Equatorial Guinea, the Central African Republic, Sudan or Congo; and RSO's account of Angola shares many similarities with these cases. Yet imperfect information often frustrates research on authoritarian regimes, and it also bedevils RSO's study of Angola. Since the use of surveys or experiments to collect data is practically impossible, RSO capitalises on his extraordinary access to unnamed elites to study authoritarian durability.

The reliance on confidential sources poses empirical challenges especially for political scientists who may want to validate or replicate the book's findings. It would have been helpful if RSO had spent a few pages addressing the challenges of research in an illiberal state, where information is not only closely guarded, but also vigorously suppressed. How should scholars treat the dearth of statistical data and the deliberate misinformation that abound in such a context? How do we build a body of knowledge on a country – on a regime type – where what we know depends on whom we know? As the literature on authoritarian politics expands, scholars need to address this confounding feature of the research process.

Notwithstanding the empirical hurdles, the book makes several powerful, theoretical contributions to the broader political economy literature. First, it questions the reality behind popular rhetoric regarding ‘Africa Rising’ and ‘Africa's Lions’. As RSO demonstrates, tropes of ‘progress’ and ‘modernity’, frenetic city building projects, promises of housing or electricity are not evidence of a growing private sector or a burgeoning middle class. They are largely ‘spectacle’, utterly contingent on high oil prices, and beneficial to a small minority of the population. Meanwhile, the state thwarts political mobilisation of any sort unless it favours the ruling party. The obvious implication is that if other examplars of ‘Africa rising’ replicate the features of ‘Angola Rising’ as many do, then the phrase is a hollow one.

Secondly, the book unpacks the myriad linkages among the Angolan state, its parastatals (especially Sonangol), private, Angolan, business interests and foreign companies from Brazil, China and Portugal. These are not just partnerships that build infrastructure, supply services or sell consumer goods in Angola. Rather, powerful Angolan firms and well-placed politicians now have a substantial presence outside of Angola, outside of Africa, in international markets from Venezuela to the United Arab Emirates.

In an ironic twist, Angolan interests have practically captured key sectors of the Portuguese economy, not only because they are engaged in ‘postcolonial score settling’ (p. 196) but also because they see Portugal as a ‘strategic partner’ (p. 197) given its location in Europe. The extent to which Angola has been able to gobble up finance, energy and real estate in Portugal may constitute a peculiar state of exception given Angola's strengths relative to Portugal's economic weaknesses. Yet, RSO's analysis of ‘state capitalist internationalization’ (p. 183) supplies the conceptual framework to explore other examples of authoritarian resilience in the global marketplace.

Lastly, RSO's arguments further erode portrayals of the ‘single unitary actor’ that pervade the political science literature on authoritarianism. Certainly, the President of Angola is a strongman, singularly gifted in his ability to survive and thrive at the top of the hierarchy since taking power in 1979. But RSO shows that despite his nearly absolute rule, his power rests on constant bargaining with a coterie of interests in the military and the ruling party. It relies too on an ever-changing contingent of external investors, diplomats and middlemen. Most tellingly, the ruling party over which he presides is not his personal appendage; it has its own internal contradictions and it will outlive him when he's gone. These observations force us to reconsider the assumptions behind stylised, rational actor models that locate control over decision making in the hands of a single leader.

At the end of this book, which reads like a political thriller, the reader is left with one nagging question – how will the rapid decline of oil prices affect Angola going forward? Popular contention and political repression are already growing, but in a rare moment of equivocation, RSO gracefully refrains from predicting Angola's future. He simply observes that, ‘Angolans have more space for self-fashioning now than ever in their tortuous history’ (p. 218). That truism will bring little comfort to those affected by the current oil bust, but RSO is right, of course. After centuries of interference, Angolans must make their own future.