During the past few decades, there has been an intensification of Foreign Land Acquisitions (FLA) in Africa. These acquisitions, which are generally driven by increased global demands for food and fuel, are often referred to by critics as ‘land grabs’. About 70 per cent of recent land acquisitions have taken place in Africa, where up to 1·7 billion hectares of ‘unused’ or ‘marginal’ land lies idle and ready for investment according to the World Bank.

This book critically analyses the role of the state in FLAs, which is a welcome and much needed focus in the debate about ‘land grabbing’. In contrast to the common idea that foreign actors ‘grab’ land illegally from weak states, the book argues that governments often invite outside investments and work in partnership with investors. Hence, investors obtain control over land through cooperation with governments, they negotiate contracts with central or local state authorities, and these authorities play a key role in paving the way for foreign investments. The editors argue that this process represents a new resurgence of the state after a few decades of neoliberal weakening of government structures and authority. The editors suggest that FLAs implicitly promote the expansion of state power by making landscapes legible, as described by James Scott in his ‘Seeing Like the State’. This increased ‘legibility’ takes place, for instance, in the form of the introduction of large-scale monocultures of food or tree crops, where previous land uses such as shifting cultivation, grazing, or the collection of medicinal plants or fuel wood are made invisible. Hence, investments do not take place on unused land as often claimed by investors and governments. The land acquired by foreign investors is generally already used by rural communities. This means that FLAs may lead to huge changes in agrarian landscapes and production systems. While investors and many African politicians and government officials see these changes as largely positive in terms of ‘modernisation’ of the agricultural sector, critics such as the authors behind this book, question these investments because of their overall adverse effects on smallholder livelihoods. For instance, the principle of Free Prior Informed Consent is at best paid lip service to by investors and governments, and rarely respected in practice. Investors also usually fail to deliver on employment and local development. In addition, this book highlights the fact that there is generally a lack of transparency surrounding the contracts and agreements associated with FLAs. This lack of transparency has been the main drive behind the various case studies presented in the chapters in this volume.

The book consists of thirteen chapters based on empirical data on land deals from a number of African countries: Botswana, South Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Nigeria, Kenya, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, and Mali. After an excellent introductory chapter that highlights the main issues in the debate about land grabbing, there are three overview chapters before the more specific case studies. In particular, I liked Ben White's contribution, which is a short and to the point introduction to the background for land acquisitions, their impacts, responses to them from grassroots and internationally, and their alternatives.

The case chapters deal with a variety of land uses from game farming in South Africa to mining in DRC to rice irrigation in Mali. Some of the chapters, however, do not discuss FLAs at all and it is surprising that these chapters have been included in the book. This for instance concerns a chapter on internal mobility and land acquisitions in Cameroon and another one on shifting patterns of land use in Burkina Faso. There is nothing wrong with these chapters apart from the fact that they do not entirely fit with the promising introduction about the role of the state in FLAs laid out by the editors. Hence, there is a mismatch between the main theme of the book outlined in the introduction and some of the more specific, case-focused chapters. This lack of coherence is also reflected in the format – through the use of different referencing styles in the bibliographies of the various chapters. Leaving this critique aside, this volume is an excellent contribution to the debate about land grabbing and a useful reminder about the role of the African state in these processes. There is also an original contribution here in the idea of a resurgence of state power following FLAs. This idea could, however, have been further developed and better documented through the empirical material presented.