State failure in sub-Saharan Africa: tbe crisis of post-colonial order.

摘要

This is a good book and deserves to be widely read. For the last three decades, a great deal of thought and effort has been put into trying to define what constitutes state failure, what causes it and how it can be overcome. Catherine Scott has made a substantive contribution to this debate in a book that illuminates both the theory and two practical examples of state failure, in Burundi and Uganda. The book has two parts: an extensive, even forensic, examination of the failed state 'thesis' and how it has been applied to Africa as a whole; and two case-studies of how the theories match up in practice to the specific examples of Burundi and Uganda, looking at their experience from pre-colonial times, through the colonial period and into the post-independence era when they were at one time or another deemed states that failed.