Ben Jones spent eighteen months of his doctoral fieldwork in Oledai, a small village in Teso, eastern Uganda. Through the ethnographic chronicle of this locality in Beyond the State in Rural Uganda, Jones challenges the dominant state-centric approach to rural Africa and offers an original reflection on how to think processes of development and social change. Confronted with the irrelevance and peripheral nature of the developmental state in this region, he adopts a more open-ended micro-analysis of ‘beyond the state’ social change through institutions ‘that matter’ at the local level. After a brief introduction to Oledai and the recent history of Teso, he builds his analysis around four central chapters and four institutions – local courts, Pentecostal and Christian churches, and burial societies – identified as the most significant ‘sites of innovation and social transformation’ (p. 10). Jones finally adds to his substantial concluding remarks an interesting methodological appendix on the difficulty scholars face when seeking to escape a state-centric developmental paradigm.

In this book, Ben Jones questions the impact of state withdrawal on social transformations and on the organization and management of public space. He focuses more on local government and social change than on development stricto sensu. Grounding his work in a thorough exploration of colonial archives, administrative documentation and oral testimonies, Jones recounts the historicity of the modern state in Teso in the long term (longue durée). His main hypothesis puts forward the idea that Oledai ‘fell outside Uganda's success story’ because of the state's lack of interest in rural Uganda (p. 3). This argument, based on the extraversion of the Ugandan state, is certainly debatable. One might say that the author successfully sheds light on alternative loci of power in rural Uganda, more than he explicitly demonstrates the lack of interest of the state as such in the countryside. The author himself highlights the opposite argument of a lack of interest by locals in national politics (p. 43). And one could criticize, conversely, his exclusive society-centred approach – arguing that it might have been more enlightening to adopt an integrated approach to the interdependencies between central state and the periphery, through processes of resistance, cooperation, mutual avoidance and/or simple coexistence. Then, from the viewpoint of political scientists, a clearer definition of the concept of development, as used by Jones, would probably also have avoided some semantic sliding between development and developments, development and social change, rural development and local governance. And finally, if one wanted to go into details, one might also object to the apparent – and probably involuntary – smoothing of the disparities offered by diversified Ugandan ruralities.

But this book remains a high-quality, fine-grained analysis of the (re)structuration of hierarchical powers at the local level and of the political stakes associated with it. It is a groundbreaking micro-history of how institutional continuity and change is achieved. It develops a valuable discussion on the durability of local institutions as well as a refreshing viewpoint on their meaning for local people (p. 10). Jones focuses on the heterogeneous and selective practices of authority at the local level. He offers a negative (in the photographic sense) of the absent Ugandan state and of its representations, opposing the ‘sedimentation’ and reappropriation processes of local institutions to the adhocracy of national ones. He articulates his thesis around three underlying and structuring themes: seniority (especially the enforcement of male seniority), prosperity (through cattle and land in Teso) and propriety (through the symbolic management of dead bodies). Jones brightly shows how in Teso institutional change has been engendered in reaction to economic changes (the introduction of tax collection, the culture of cotton and the associated chief system introduced then to oversee its production), and social transformations induced by historical upheavals like colonization or the insurgency of the 1990s.

Finally, the only significant critique that can be raised is that it is too short a book. Each chapter could have been the topic of a whole manuscript. Ben Jones makes us want to learn more about Teso and the rural political realm. The clan structures appear between the lines but could be explored in detail in terms of their linkage with power and authority. The comparison initiated by the author through the use of a literature dedicated to countries other than Uganda should also be pursued through a comparison with other Ugandan ruralities, whether in marginalized areas of Uganda (West Nile, northern Uganda, or Karamoja, for instance), or on the contrary in the rural parts of central Uganda where the regime first established its administrative structure during the 1981–6 bush war, in order to provide civilians with salt, sugar and soap. Such a contrasted approach could tackle the link between the absence of the state, and its de facto modes of penetration. Last but not least, Ben Jones incidentally raises hypotheses on various related topics affecting Teso (such as the politics of the insurgency years, intergenerational conflicts, or land issues) that are all still largely undocumented and would definitely constitute an interesting complement or continuation to this brilliant research.