LAUSR

This outstanding book casts new light on the relationship between power sharing, coups, and civil wars in subSaharan Africa. In a piece of scholarship that is remarkable for its analytic clarity, methodological transparency, and commitment to comparative testing, Philip Roessler provides an exemplar of how inductive theorizing from a single case can be used to develop theory with much broader applicability. The book’s central argument is that African rulers face a perilous trade-off when deciding how much power to share with other ethnic groups. Building on his 2011 article, Roessler argues that rulers face a coup–civil war trap (“The Enemy Within: Personal Rule, Coups, and Civil War in Africa,” World Politics, 63(2), 2011). If they share power with a particular ethnic group, rulers are at greater risk of being thrown out of office via a coup orchestrated by group members. But if they exclude the group from power, they are at greater risk of the group’s successful launch of a civil war. Given the lower and less immediate probability of their losing office via civil war, Roessler argues that African rulers have chosen to mitigate the first risk at the expense of the second in most places: “One of the devastating implications that follows from this theoretical framework is that civil war represents the consequences of a strategic choice by rulers, backed by their coethnics, to coup-proof their regimes from their ethnic rivals” (p. xvi). The book also makes an original secondary argument about the mechanism by which ethnic exclusion leads to increased civil war risk. Ethnic exclusion does not only instigate grievances; it also leads to weaker counterinsurgency efforts as the government cannot tap into local networks to provide critical information on rebels. In contrast, ethnic inclusion facilitates counterinsurgency but also increases the ability of ethnic leaders to mobilize military force against the incumbent ruler in a coup d’état. The theoretical framework also makes predictions about the circumstances under which rulers trade off the risk of civil war for the risk of a coup and power sharing emerges. If a group is well positioned to capture the capital city in a civil war, its chance of seizing power via rebellion begins to approximate its chance of doing so via a coup. In these instances, rulers may be willing to share power with the group, especially if their own group also has high threat capacity and is therefore likely to be included in any future power-sharing agreement if a coup d’état does materialize. Ethnic Politics and State Power in Africa begins by outlining its argument at length in the first section of the book. Then the author provides empirical evidence drawing on multiple methods, including a qualitative study of Darfur that was used to build the theory, crossnational quantitative tests, and qualitative tests using the case of Africa’s “GreatWar” in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The study of Darfur in the second section is particularly remarkable. It draws on elite interviews in Khartoum, Darfur, Asmara, N’Djamena, Abuja, Europe, and the United States to explain why a full-scale civil war did not break out in the region in the early 1990s but did in the early 2000s. Roessler shows both that Sudan’s Islamic Movement was critical in keeping the peace in Darfur and that Omar al-Bashir recognized this even as he decided to purge Hassan al-Turabi and his supporters from the government after December 1999 to avoid a coup. The author then tests the effect of power sharing on coups and civil wars in the book’s third section using the Ethnic Power Relations (EPR) data set developed by Andreas Wimmer, Lars-Erik Cederman, and Brian Min based on expert surveys (“Ethnic Politics and Armed Conflict: A Configurational Analysis of a New Global Dataset,” American Sociological Review, 74(2), 2009). Utilizing data on all ethnic groups in sub-Saharan Africa included in the data set, from independence to 2005, Roessler shows that ethnic groups that are included in the central government are significantly more likely to be involved in coup attempts and significantly less likely to be involved in rebellion. Because he places great theoretical emphasis on power sharing as a strategic decision based on groups’ threat capabilities, it is surprising that his empirical models do not account for this. However, if his theoretical predictions about when rulers share power with groups are correct (i.e., power sharing occurs when civil war threat is high or coup threat is low), he is biasing