With The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa, Alex de Waal has written a masterpiece in the field of contemporary political economy. Following the footprints of Jean-François Bayart's famous book The State in Africa: The Politics of the Belly, de Waal analyses the relationship between political finance, the shifting price of loyalty, and the regulation of the political marketplace for the Horn of Africa. The book sheds a great deal of light on the organisation of violence, its reason and purpose, not only in the states of the Horn and the sub-regional units of Darfur and Somaliland, but also in adjacent countries, a region neglected by Bayart.

De Waal shows how war and endless peace negotiations have been built in a globalised economic and political market, how local power holders, diasporas, and international aid agencies and governments are interacting and producing cartels, oligopolies and international patronage systems. Whereas South Sudan presents an extreme case of rent-dependent kleptocracy, Somaliland emerges as an example where the devastating influence of political entrepreneurs was cut off, and a balance was made possible between local business, a functioning state, and a near-monopoly of violence of a powerful army. The movement of political finance through remittances and profits of parastatals, including military business in the 1980s and 1990s to an oil-rent based political marketplace is the backdrop on which the price of loyalty increased tremendously in Sudan. It culminated in the Comprehensive Peace Agreement of 2005, a rent-sharing mechanism that led to the independence of South Sudan and provided the model for endless contestation over claims on finance in Darfur. In Eritrea, political finance increasingly came from illicit businesses and participation in the regional political marketplace as a militarised political business corporation after separation in 1991. De Waal contrasts these countries with Ethiopia, where an authoritarian leadership pursued an ambitious state-led growth and development strategy, trying to avoid rentierism. However, more recently, Ethiopia is on its way to acquire peacekeeping rents in regional interventions. De Waal concludes each chapter with future prospects, the evolving political business structure, and the position of the respective sub-region or state in the global political patronage system.

The book answers the question of why state-building does not progress in the region, with the exception of Ethiopia. Alex de Waal pits the strengthened political marketplace against transformative political agendas and state-building, which, in spite of all rhetoric, have been abandoned in favour of the extensive appropriation of new rents. These include human rights rents from transnational solidarity movements, negotiation rents in lengthy and repeated peace talks, counter-terrorism rents, and increasingly, rents from peacekeeping. De Waal devotes his final two chapters to these global extensions of the political marketplace, putting phenomena such as jihadism and ethnicity in a political economy perspective.

The book is a thrilling read, mainly because it is based on the author's many years of research in the field. It is a must-read for everyone getting involved professionally in the Horn.