Foreign Affairs. January-February 2020

Recent Books

202 foreign affairs

China, Africa, and the Future of the

Internet

BY IGINIO GAGLIARDONE. Zed

Books, 2019, 192 pp.

Recent newspaper reports in the West

have claimed that some Chinese tele-

communications firms, such as Huawei

and zte, are helping some African

governments spy on their citizens and

limit access to the Internet. Observers

also suggest that Beijing is helping

African states establish the same anti-

democratic control over the Internet that

it champions at home. Gagliardone’s

book provides a more measured account.

He does not deny that a number of

African governments have upgraded

their ability to monitor and limit Inter-

net activity with Chinese assistance. But

he reminds readers that Chinese invest-

ments have also substantially improved

Internet and phone access in many

African countries. According to Gagliar-

done, Beijing has not attached political

conditions to these investments and

doesn’t privilege regimes that it favors.∂

The Puzzle of Ethiopian Politics

BY TERRENCE LYONS. Lynne

Rienner, 2019, 245 pp.

Lyons’s political history of post–Haile

Selassie Ethiopia is timely, as the new

prime minister, Abiy Ahmed (who won

the Nobel Peace Prize in 2019), tries to

sustain a beleaguered program of political

liberalization. Beginning in the late

1970s, the Tigrayan People’s Liberation

Front carried out a disciplined and

highly centralized insurgency that

toppled the Soviet-backed dictatorship

in 1991. Once in power, the tplf leader

Meles Zenawi built a broader, more

inclusive party, the Ethiopian People’s

Revolutionary Democratic Front, which

recognized and sought to incorporate

all the ethnic groups in the country,

creating a decentralized ethnic federation.

Meles led Ethiopia for more than two

decades: first as president, from 1991

until 1995, and then as prime minister,

until his death in 2012. Lyons does a

great job of analyzing how Meles ably

managed the fissiparous tendencies of the

eprdf while continuing to make most of

the key decisions through a coterie of

tplf leaders and why this balancing act

could not outlive him. Ethiopians have

welcomed Abiy’s promises to end the

Meles regime’s sometimes heavy-handed

repression of political rights, but the

country is now wrestling with the

fragmentary pressures of ethnic politics

that Meles managed to contain.

Foreign Affairs (ISSN 00157120), January/February 2020, Volume 99, Number 1. Published six times annually (January, March, May,

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