This insightful study examines the foreign policy of post-colonial Cameroon with its major former metropole, France (the much smaller British Cameroon was united with French Cameroon in 1961), principally during the regime of its first independence era leader, Ahmadou Ahidjo (1960–82). Tesi's commendable effort takes as its theoretical point of departure the complex interdependence perspective of Keohane and Nye to explicate the varying influence of France on Cameroon's bilateral and multilateral international relations with respect to eight foreign policy disputes: recognition of Biafra during the Nigerian Civil War of 1967–1970, regionalisation in OCAM (Organization Commune Africaine et Malgache) with respect to air transport (e.g. Air Afrique and Cameroon Airlines (Cam Air)), international partnership(s) in Cameroonian economic development enterprises (e.g. Cotonnière Industrielle du Cameroun (CICAM), Cimenteries du Cameroun (CIMENCAM)), recognition of the MPLA government in post-independence Angola, voting against France in the UN on independence for Djibouti, and opposition to France in support for African liberation movements especially in apartheid South Africa and in post-UDI in Rhodesia.

Tesi argues that Cameroon's foreign policy was oriented towards non-alignment, and rooted in protection of its national unity and sovereignty, and economic development, and sought relative autonomy and independence in its diplomacy without alienating its former colonisers, contributing to ‘Cameroon's flexibility and ideological moderation’ (p. 30). In contrast to neocolonial, dependency or balance of power approaches that view the politico-military and economic disparity of African states to their former colonisers – and major powers, as compelling Africa's compliance with metropolitan politico-economic interests, Tesi argues that Cameroon's bilateral and multilateral foreign policy also reveals transactional characteristics with France and other Francophone African states beyond what such perspectives might expect. For example, in the eight cases that Tesi analyses, Ahidjo was able to realise his objectives in opposition to the French in five of them, while the French realised theirs in three. For Tesi, such ‘selective compliance’ is characteristic of ‘Franco-Cameroonian’ international relations, and belies ‘the contention that economic dependence leads to foreign policy compliance’. Instead, ‘[t]he Franco-Cameroonian example reveals that economic factors competed with noneconomic factors’ in determining foreign policy outcomes (pp. 198–9). He also notes that those interactions in which Cameroon prevailed were characterised by their greater political rather than economic relevance to Ahidjo's regime (Biafra, Air Afrique, Djibouti, MPLA, African Liberation); and those outcomes favouring France were more relevant, economically, to the regime in Paris (Cam Air, CICAM, CIMENCAM). Thus, even as France continued to dominate the broader politico-military and economic context of Cameroonian international relations, nonetheless, this condition did not preclude Cameroon from exercising a notable degree of autonomy in its foreign policy.

The strong suit of the work is its attentiveness to Cameroon's diplomatic history; but the review of the cases is unbalanced. While individual chapters are devoted to the Biafran War and the OCAM-Air Afrique cases, those related to the six remaining cases are subsumed in a single chapter – and these are the cases in which Tesi's model does no better in explaining the outcomes than alternative accounts. More troubling, is that Tesi's application of his theoretical model is also unbalanced. It would have helped if he had derived propositions from his model, initially, and then applied them in a focused way to each case. An attempt to apply the theoretical model in a systematic way appears as an afterthought in the penultimate chapter where Tesi provides a brief discussion of the cases along with a useful table outlining each of them; the relevance of political, economic and strategic factors in each; and their outcomes relative to Cameroon and France's initial objectives. More useful would have been a comparison of the accuracy of specific propositions derived from the author's theoretical model (i.e. ‘a power model built around complex interdependence and cooperation’) and those from contrasting models discussed in the opening chapter (e.g. dependency, neocolonial, balance of power), given the outcomes of each of the cases (p. 5). While shortcomings such as these prevent our drawing stronger and more generalisable inferences from Tesi's analysis, nonetheless, he has provided a constructive examination of important factors influencing Cameroon's foreign policy and has contributed to that literature suggesting the relevance of modified models in mainstream IR to Africa's international relations, and that which demonstrates the agency of African states in their foreign policies in the post-colonial era in spite of their often subaltern position in world affairs.