This valuable edited volume examines the roots of, triggers for, consequence from and possibly responses to electoral violence in Africa. In the introduction, Dorina A. Bekoe makes a convincing argument for focusing attention on electoral violence as a separate phenomenon. Although electoral violence is responsible for a small proportion of the total losses from political violence, it can be especially harmful to democratic development and stability. Electoral violence can diminish support for democracy and undermine the legitimacy of government by discouraging turnout, deterring candidates from running and distorting representation of citizen preferences.

The book consists of a series of case studies embedded within a comprehensive cross-national analysis of the frequency and patters of electoral violence. A brief introduction and conclusion by Bekoe frame the empirical chapters. The first empirical chapter by Scott Straus and Charlie Taylor is among the most interesting. They created a comprehensive dataset called the African Electoral Violence Database, which documents electoral violence in Africa from 1990 to 2008. Although they describe the chapter as a ‘descriptive overview’ (p. 17), their findings challenge several conventional views of the causes of electoral violence. First, electoral violence is not a ubiquitous outcome of democratisation in Africa. Widespread violence occurred in only 10% of the elections in the dataset and there was no reported violence in 42% of the elections. Furthermore, Africa has not experienced a downward trend in electoral violence, even though African states became more democratic on average between 1990 and 2008. Second, most electoral violence was perpetrated by incumbents during the pre-election campaign period. Electoral violence is primarily the result of incumbent leaders subverting democratic institutions to maintain power, rather than calculated strategies by disadvantaged opposition leaders or spontaneous explosions by desperate and disaffected opposition supporters.

The remaining empirical chapters consist of comparative case studies by country experts, including: Nigeria and Sudan (Timothy D. Sisk), Zimbabwe and Cote d'Ivoire (Catherine Boone and Norma Kriger), Togo and Zanzibar (Dorina A. Bekoe), Kenya (Susanne D. Mueller), Ethiopia (Lahra Smith) and Ghana (Franklin Odoru). Astutely, these case studies cover some of the most notable instances of extreme violence as well as elections with minimal violence and cases where interventions forestalled the escalation of violence.

In the conclusion, Bekoe avoids the temptation to offer policy-makers a set diagnosis for the cause of electoral violence or a single prescription for preventing or reducing violence. Bekoe provides a set of considerations and recommends expert analysis to determine the most relevant issues for a given country. She suggests that those interested in predicting electoral violence should be attentive to the history of election violence, the context in which an election takes place, the structure of the patronage system and the country's institutional capacity. She also cautions that solutions designed to mitigate violence in the short run, such as post-election political agreements, could have negative long-term implications for democracy.

The volume as a whole, and some of the individual chapters, would have benefited from a stronger theoretical structure. Perhaps as a result of the exclusive focus on electoral violence, not enough attention was paid to relevant theories from well-developed bodies of literature on political violence, authoritarian repression, vote-buying and electoral malfeasance. The comprehensive statistical overview also calls into question some of the conclusions from the case studies. Most notably, the case studies describe elections as trigger points for simmering tensions, but Straus and Taylor find that, on average, election periods are slightly less violent than non-election years.

Bekoe compiled a valuable collection of empirically rich research on an understudied topic. The volume provides a much needed foundational text for the study of electoral violence, while also uncovering empirical puzzles and research questions worthy of further investigation. Scholars, civil society leaders, government officials and foreign donors will learn a lot from this volume about the important topic of electoral violence.