Coups are more common, but civil wars more costly. As a leader, which would you rather risk facing? According to Philip Roessler, this is the crucial security choice rulers face if they want to maintain power in weak states. Yet, both ‘the strategic relationship between coups and civil wars’ (p. 296) and ‘competition for control of the central government’ (p. xv) have been marginal to recent civil war research. Ethnic Politics and State Power in Africa remedies this gap through a multi-method nested analysis of how bargaining failures result in conflict escalation. Using Sudan, Congo and, to a lesser extent, Liberia as cases, it offers a compelling example of fieldwork-driven comparative research that underscores the importance of domestic power politics for explaining conflict. Roessler draws on international relations theory to bring power politics back into civil war studies by assuming that ethnically divided weak states are anarchic systems, where power rests in the threat of force, while peace rests in credible commitments not to use that force. This approach offers an important meso-level corrective to prevailing civil war research that largely focuses on micro-level theories of violence and macro-structural causes of conflict.
Ethnic conflict research in particular has often started from the assumption that ethnic politics are inherently divisive. Yet, as Roessler notes, interethnic alliances are instrumental in extending political control. What accounts, therefore, for ethnopolitical exclusion, where rulers risk alienating and forfeiting control over rival groups? He hones in on the ways in which informal institutions structure weak states, and argues that rulers need to share power to keep the peace, but often exclude rivals as a strategic gamble to protect against coup threats. This strategy increases the risk of rebellion from marginalized groups with threat capabilities. Refreshingly, Roessler's argument does not hyper-rationalize elite behaviour. Instead, he lets empirical realities – political structures, formal institutions and material power balances – sit alongside perceptions, norms and social constructs with interacting explanatory potential. While causal identification purists may wish for a more parsimonious approach, the resulting strategic exclusion theory makes plenty of room for how fear, ‘uncertainty, and mutual suspicion’ (p. 143) can lead to objectively bad outcomes for all.
Two keen observations drive forward the analysis. The phenomenon of co-ethnic peace finds that ‘African rulers have almost never faced large-scale insurgencies from their coethnics’ (p. 48). Conversely, non-co-ethnic co-conspirators are twice as likely as other powerbrokers to be purged from new regimes (p. 230). Roessler argues that this counterintuitive dynamic is the result of a two-level game, wherein elites use intra-ethnic bargaining to bolster support among core constituents while pursuing inter-ethnic alliances that strengthen their legitimacy at the national level. His careful theoretic engagement with ethnicity as a political force and social resource contributes to an increasingly rigorous body of ethnic politics/conflict research. Roessler tries to avoid reifying the affective or material dimensions of ethnicity, and instead argues that ethnicity offers ‘an ascriptive identity [that serves] as a heuristic device to sort allies from enemies’ (p. 161). He borrows from social network theory to explain the importance of elite brokerage and norm enforcement within groups, while also turning to the Ethnic Power Relations dataset to run empirical tests of the argument's inter-group structural implications.
Roessler's skill as a field researcher shines in his analysis of Sudan, which presents an engaging, detailed account of how elite power struggles deteriorated into multiple civil wars. He explains how the multi-ethnic tanzim network, which orchestrated Islamic party power behind the scenes, failed to overcome the divide between Bashir and Turabi. The split in the National Islamic Front and the resulting war in Darfur also provide a valuable test for the relative importance of politicized ethnicity compared with other partisan and religious identities. Moreover, Roessler uses the non-incidence of civil war – particularly the Sudanese People's Liberation Army's (SPLA's) failed attempt in 1991 to extend its insurgency to Darfur – to identify the timing of conflict onset, and the preventive logic of cooperative counterinsurgency in multi-ethnic ruling coalitions. He plumbs interviews on the Congo Wars to unravel similar patterns of co-conspirator fragmentation. In Sudan and Congo, weak state theories overdetermine conflict and are ‘too static to account for the dynamic process[es] of civil war’ (p. 106). Unearthing original empirical and theoretical insights that travel across both countries is no small feat.
It bears noting that the book is much more about ‘the politics of political survival in weak states’ (p. 296) than it is about civil war or violence per se. ‘Violence specialists’ are the key actors in Roessler's theory yet remain undertheorized, described only as ‘those who are able to mobilize the use of force to protect themselves and their followers from rival networks’ (p. 44). The followers upon whose mobilization civil war depends are largely missing; and the pre-eminence of rivals arising from within the military (astutely noted in DRC and other ‘split domination’ regimes) is not examined directly. These and other limitations of the book herald important questions for future research, including how inter-ethnic alliances play out in insurgencies, not just incumbent regimes; and, conversely, how commitment problems and security dilemmas are overcome in weak states with durable peace. Raising these questions while raising the bar for nested theory and multi-method research makes Roessler's analysis of ethnic power politics and the coup–civil war trap a valuable addition to research on armed conflict and politics more broadly.
