The dominant strains of international relations theory have an Africa problem. This is the central argument of Errol Henderson's provocative new book, African Realism? International Relations Theory and Africa's Wars in the Postcolonial Era. Henderson criticises the application of extant realist, neorealist and liberal theory to African international relations on the grounds that these bodies of theory tacitly assume Weberian definitions of statehood and focus on the interactions between territorially sovereign entities with clearly defined and defended borders, effective rule of law, professional militaries subject to central political control, and economic exchanges occurring in ‘legitimate’ markets. Henderson argues the legacy of colonialism was to create state institutions that made borders inviolate but undermined effective rule of law and the creation of durable, Weberian state institutions. Rather, the African state that emerged was neopatrimonial in nature, in which authority is achieved and maintained through informal channels that parallel formal state institutions. The post-colonial African state is different in kind, not just degree. Thus, one of the central assumptions of neorealist theory – the assumption of functional equivalence, or that all states are organised along similar lines and fulfil similar functions – is challenged.

This leads Henderson to critique and invert traditional neorealist and institutional (i.e. democratic peace) arguments. Conventional balancing behaviour – where states ally with other states to balance the power of more powerful states – is recast as ‘neopatrimonial balancing’, a process whereby African political leaders develop patronage networks that extend across borders, leading leaders to balance by allying with insurgents, rather than governments, in neighbouring countries. These behaviours have meant that Africa's full-scale interstate wars – the Ogaden War, the Uganda–Tanzanian War, the Ethiopia–Eritrean War, the war in the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Ethiopia–Somalia War of 2006 – began as domestic conflicts and, because of these neopatrimonial networks, spilled across borders. Thus, African interstate wars rarely conform to the implicitly dyadic – state-to-state – models of conflict initiation and termination that predominate in the literature.

Regarding the democratic peace, Henderson counters the dominant logic that democratic leaders are the most constrained from using force abroad. Rather, he argues, precisely because democratic institutions make African leaders more legitimate at home, they are comparatively less constrained by narrow neopatrimonial networks and fearful of domestic armed challengers. Whereas neopatrimonial leaders have much to fear from sending troops abroad, leaving their regimes undefended, democratic leaders do not. Jointly democratic dyads – that is, pairs of countries with domestically legitimate leaders – should be more likely to go to war. Henderson substantiates this finding both with case-based evidence and quantitative analysis that extends his earlier work published in the British Journal of Political Science.

To some, Henderson's book will read as yet another nail in the coffin of paradigmatic approaches to IR theory. To others, it will contextualise (some might say arbitrage) some well-established arguments in the comparative politics literature into the international relations literature. Henderson is not the first to note the unique nature of state institutions, the state building process, and the jointly domestic and international processes that determine conflict outcomes in the African context – Jeffrey Herbst, Catherine Boone, Crawford Young, Joel Migdal, Leonard Wantchekon and Idean Salehyan have made significant contributions along these lines – but he is among the first to think systematically about what these differences might mean for mainstream IR theory and traditional, dyadic interstate approaches to war, peace and trade. Most challengingly, he situates the prior failure to recognise these unique dynamics or to take seriously the different character of interstate relations in Africa in the sorry, even racist, Western tradition of viewing African conflicts as expressions of ethnic hatreds and ‘tribalism’. His argument challenges the application of mainstream IR theory outside of interactions between Weberian, i.e. mostly Western states, suggesting perhaps that mainstream IR theory does not actually have an Africa problem – it has a Western exceptionalism problem.