Guinea-Bissau: Micro-State to ‘Narco-State’ is dedicated to the memory of Patrick Chabal, who began it with Toby Green and died before its completion. Chabal was a renowned Africanist, known for, among other things, his excellent biography of Amílcar Cabral.Footnote ¹ His careful research and insightful conclusions are indispensable to our understanding of Guinea-Bissau's past.

This volume builds on Chabal's legacy by impressively placing Guinea-Bissau's present political and economic crises in historical context. For the contributors, whose backgrounds represent a variety of academic disciplines, the civil war in Guinea-Bissau in 1998 and 1999 was a turning point in the country's economic and political trajectory. Since then, Guinea-Bissau has experienced military coup after military coup and been subjected to ever-increasing levels of elite corruption. The country is today teetering on the edge of becoming a failed state. Taken together, the Introduction, ten chapters, and Conclusion examine the causes of the 1998 and 1999 civil war and the continuities and discontinuities in politics, economics, and cultural expressions before and after it. One of the most striking results of the civil war was that international drug syndicates were able to exploit political instability to establish in Guinea-Bissau transshipment centers for narcotics. The volume asks what it means to be a narco-state and whether the label should be applied to Guinea-Bissau.

In the chapters of Part One, Green, Joshua B. Forrest, and Philip J. Havik examine the extent to which crises since the civil war of 1998 and 1999 resulted from long-term economic and political realities. Green argues that ethnic tensions, which have been a driver of conflict in Guinea-Bissau since 1999, must be understood as a product of the ethnic categories that were created under Portuguese colonialism and reinforced by postcolonial elites. Forrest continues the deep analysis of the region's past by describing the long history of state fragility in the area. Lacking legitimacy in local civil societies, the Portuguese colonial state embraced violence to gain compliance. Similarly, after Guinea-Bissau's civil war, ‘violent military interventions would dominate the state-level arena’ (53). Havik also describes a disconnect between the state and local civil society. He examines continuities over time in rural farmers’ abilities to produce, without state support, monocrop exports and subsistence crops for consumption.

In Part Two of the volume, contributors explore manifestations of Guinea-Bissau's present crises. Marina Padrão Temudo and Manuel Bivar Abrantes argue that the civil war of the late 1990s marked a turning point for Guinea-Bissau's rural societies. Before the civil war, food sovereignty strategies made rural societies resilient. Since the civil war, rural people have struggled to adjust to climate change, the social consequences of an increased reliance on cashews as an export crop, and the state's imposition of structural adjustment measures. Moreover, during and after the civil war, elites engaged in behaviors that were harmful to rural societies, causing rural people to perceive the state as ‘cannibalizing the lives of people’ (103). If the civil war marked a turning point for agricultural production, it also marked a turning point for religion, which has exercised increasing influence in the public sphere since 1999. Yet, Ramon Sarró and Miguel de Barros argue that religious life in Guinea-Bissau shows continuities over time, as people today use ‘mixed religion’, as they did in the past, to cope with the crises that they face (122).

Part Two also features chapters by Aliou Ly and José Lingna Nafafé. Ly considers the role of ‘gendered-decision making and male self-interest’ in opening Guinea-Bissau to narco-trafficking (126). Nafafé examines the nature of Guinea-Bissau's diaspora since the civil war. Whereas in previous decades those who earned degrees abroad often returned home, since about 2000 that has not been the norm, and ‘brain drain’ has exacerbated the country's political and economic decline. Nonetheless, new technologies such as the internet allow members of the diaspora to maintain regular contact with and influence the thinking of people in Guinea-Bissau.

The final part of the volume examines the political consequences of Guinea-Bissau's recent crises. Christopher Kohl provides a detailed overview of the political landscape since independence. He argues that ‘an increase in the ethnicization of Guinea-Bissau's politics’ is evident among elites but cannot yet be identified throughout society (164–5). Simon Massey explores how the arrival of South American drug syndicates in Guinea-Bissau affected the balance of power between political and military elites. Exploiting wealth from the drug trade, military commanders have increasingly used violence to stymie attempts at reform and to exercise control over politicians. Finally, Hassoum Ceesay examines the implications of massive amounts of narcotics moving from South America through Guinea-Bissau and on to Europe: the depression of salaries in the civil service; decay of hospitals; disillusionment of the young; decline of cultural institutions; collapse of the education sector; fostering of safe havens for insurgents from other countries; assassination of reporters; and destruction of the judicial system. ‘It is hard’, Ceesay concludes, ‘for a keen observer like this writer to offer anything but a negative prognosis for the future’ (227).

Green, Chabal, and this volume's contributors have produced a frank, insightful, and poignant must-read analysis of Guinea-Bissau's recent political and economic crises. What the volume says most powerfully is that this micro-state is not on the minds enough of the world's scholarly community and policy makers. To be sure, Green is correct that ‘Guinea-Bissau is still currently a country that “works’’’ (234). It works despite the fact that people in the region have long coped with the devastating consequences of the West's demands — centuries ago for sugar and tobacco and now for cocaine. It works because folk in Guinea-Bissau — those people whom political elites have failed to serve — have to make it work as they seek to care for their families and chart their own course.