Recent Books
200 foreign affairs
of the privileged official class, who then
retaliated, giving rise to rounds of conflict
based on class status. Walder, however,
has devoted decades to examining the
local records of nearly all of China’s
2,000-plus county-level jurisdictions. He
found that factions emerged from the
splintering, rather than the congealing, of
class-based groups. Small clusters of
students, workers, and cadres struggling
to respond to Mao’s shifting directives
made split-second decisions about whom
to align with. Political identities did not
shape the conflict; they emerged from it.
To explain this process of identity
formation, he offers a theory of “factions
as emergent properties” and suggests
that similar dynamics may characterize
social movements everywhere.Africa
Nicolas van de Walle
Horn, Sahel, and Rift: Fault-Lines of the
African Jihad
BY STIG JARLE HANSEN. Hurst,
2019, 320 pp.Everything You Have Told Me Is True:
The Many Faces of Al Shabaab
BY MARY HARPER. Hurst, 2019, 208 pp.T
wo great books thoughtfully
document the persistence of
radical Islamist militancy in
Africa. Hansen’s is a more conventional
political history of the main groups
operating in Africa, with chapters
devoted to Jamaat Nusrat al-Islam
wal-Muslimin in Mali and West Africa,Muslims agreed to a peace deal in Maluku
in 2002, large-scale violent episodes
continued to take place. After Indonesian
forces finally quashed a separatist rebel-
lion in Aceh in 2005, violence occurred
frequently but on a small scale. And in
North Maluku, an ethnic conflict that had
religious overtones gave way to a period
of stability with little violence. When
explaining such disparate outcomes,
scholars often focus on the effectiveness
of reconciliation programs in softening
communal hostility. But Barron takes a
different approach, one based on his
experience working in Indonesia for the
World Bank. The key to minimizing the
risk of conflict in these situations, he
argues, is to ensure that formerly feuding
elites have access to sufficient funds and
political posts to provide security and
stability. The focus on material incentives
should be useful for policymakers. But
judging from the informative stories that
Barron uses to illustrate his analysis,
primal hatreds still fuel conflict and do
not yield easily to institutional fixes.
Agents of Disorder: Inside China’s Cultural
Revolution
BY ANDREW G. WALDER. Harvard
University Press, 2019, 288 pp.
Scholars seeking to decode the organizing
logic of the mass violence that marked
China’s Cultural Revolution of the 1960s
have long followed the clue provided by
the Mao-era slogan “If the father is a
hero, the son is a good fellow; if the father
is a reactionary, the son is a rotten egg.”
They have argued that when the Chinese
leader Mao Zedong put out the call to
“bombard the headquarters,” people
whose families had been labeled “bad
elements” rose up to overthrow members