Sub-Saharan Africa suffers from states that are too weak to deliver services or even basic order to their peoples. Things really are falling apart, and challenged by a wide variety of locally based resistance movements or popular indifference, control by the center cannot hold. Joshua Forrest, author of solid monographs on Guine-Bissao and Namibia, takes on the challenge of describing and explaining the whole “process of political mobilization by regionally-based forces” (p. 1) that defy central authority, and for which he coins the term “subnationalism.” By this he includes a wide panoply of movements seeking autonomy, redress for grievances, secession, revenge, or old-fashioned plunder, so long as they are based on a population or region that is a subset of the juridical nation.

In categorizing these movements Forrest first distinguishes “uni-ethnic” and “interethnic” movements. In both cases, however, building alliances is a fundamental skill, whether the alliances bring together villages, clans, moieties, or whole ethnic groups. Such alliances may be facilitated by precolonial collaborative practices, resurrected and appealed to in contemporary times. Such practices constitute a “historical and cultural subtext” (p. 1) that can produce surprising alliances among seemingly disparate peoples. Important as alliance building and precolonial practices may be, they cannot explain the rise or success of autonomy-seeking movements. They are subject to four “overarching causative factors” (p. 2): a history of state intervention in regional affairs; long-term economic inequities; conscious or ascriptive adherence to ethnic or regional identity patterns; and the instrumentalist leadership of movement elites. Beyond those four “overarching” processes, three additional factors from the postcolonial period play a role: changes in the international state system, weakening of ties between center and periphery, and improvement in rebels' organizational capacity.

Those are a lot of variables whose relationship one to the other, definition, boundaries, and metrics are not clear. Whenever the facts provide no comfort to the argument, Forrest seems to stir a few more “factors” into the mix. For example, on pages 54 to 56, “international disfavoring of subnational uprisings,” “social convergence and social change,” “the inability of some movement leaders to overcome interethnic factionalism,” “central-state elites' ability to manipulate ethnic and local leaders,” and “the fragility [of] public bureaucracies” are presented as factors inhibiting subnationalism, and six more represented as factors promoting subnationalism. But of course, additional factors may upset the mix and cause another to have a contrary effect (e.g., “bureaucratic fragility”). Then, too, some factors operate both as dependent and independent variables (e.g., regional leaders' ability or inability to repress factionalism).

The reader seeking theoretical clarity on local and regional political movements in Africa may come away frustrated. Nonetheless, Forrest's work makes important contributions to our understanding of the process. First, he provides excellent, brief case studies of subnationalist movements paired according to a core common characteristic. Some of these pairings are surprising, for example, the separatist movements of Senegal's Casamance region and of southern Sudan. For all the differences of scale and habitat, the rebellions share problems of maintaining interethnic alliances and a history of discriminatory treatment at the hands of the central government. Ethiopia's Oromo rebellion and Nigeria's Biafran secessionist movement are paired as examples of single-ethnic separatism, and Forrest shows how each has been limited by a common failure to form alliances with neighboring ethnic groups. Other pairings include Angola's National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) and Namibia's little-known Caprivi Liberation Army; Zulu, Afrikaner, and Tigrayan ethnic supremacist movements manipulating appeals to past glories; and a wide variety of “retraditionalizing” movements that, in the absence of effective control by central authorities, have restored or reinvented kingships based on some version of precolonial—and colonial—precedent. Readers may quarrel with Forrest's choice of core factors providing the rationale for the pairings, but they can learn much in the process.

Two lessons in particular emerge from Forrest's choice of cases. First is the importance of building alliances, both within and across ethnic lines. As was the case of nationalist independence movements 40 and 50 years ago, the success of subnationalist movements for the foreseeable future is likely to require ethnic bargaining and alliance formation. As Forrest states, alliances may increasingly be based on patterns of cooperation and trust established in precolonial times. Second, while recognizing that scholars have been right to dispel simplistic views of African primitive “tribalism,” they now must acknowledge ethnicity in its many levels and forms as a major factor in much of Africa's social and political life, a factor that requires the careful empirical study that Subnationalism in Africa demonstrates, as well as the careful reconceptualization that this book's limitations invite.