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Examines how ruling and contending elites in Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Sudan have shaped political order through strategic bargaining over violence and rents.
Violence and State-Building configures an elite-centered, ethnicity-mediated institutional framework to assess state-building trajectories in precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial contexts in three African states. Institutionalist approaches are rarely deployed with African case studies, raising the question of whether African elites are uniquely greedy or incapable of organic institutional transition. By contrast, Kaleb Demerew takes agency seriously, acknowledging the possibility that African elites may have state-building aspirations, and uses thick description and rich historical accounts to explain varying constraints on their decisions. Actions that appear bad or irrational may in fact belie a strategic calculation, even when the resulting decisions produce suboptimal social outcomes. Specifically, the book examines how ruling and contending elites deploy violence and the threat of it alongside offers of rents, understood as special access to political or economic goods, and how these interactions shape political order. Drawing on government documents, archives, historical sources, and elite interviews, Demerew presents comparative case analysis of Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Sudan, offering an institutionalist alternative to neopatrimonialism and liberal state-building.
"Kaleb Demerew critiques the neopatrimonialism framework for misdiagnosing state-building impediments in post-colonial Africa and challenges liberal paradigms for imposing unrealistic benchmarks drawn from developed democracies. In its place, he advances the 'violence trap' framework, showing how the strategic deployment of violence and rents by ruling and contending elites shapes different political orders. Building on the foundations of Cox, North, and Weingast, Demerew makes a significant contribution to the study of African politics and comparative political development." —Brendon J. Cannon, Institute of International and Civil Security, Khalifa University of Science and Technology
Kaleb Demerew is a Non-Resident Scholar at the Center for Governance and Markets at the University of Pittsburgh and Assistant Professor of Political Science at Hope College.