The Commodification of African Politics I

Can a book be both inspiring and disappointing? The Real Politics of the Horn of Africa might just fall into this rare category. Alex de Waal’s book is theoretically original and empirically rich, but it is also reductionist and, in the case of Ethiopia, biased. The book makes sense of the Horn of Africa’s complex contemporary politics through the prism of three elements. Firstly, de Waal proposes an innovative theory centred on the idea of the ‘political marketplace’. This theory grasps the causal interactions between violence, political finance and big man politics in East Africa and elsewhere. The ‘political marketplace’ framework is arguably the book’s most important contribution and it speaks to political scientists and policy analysts. Secondly, as the title suggests, the book sets out to explain the Horn of Africa’s ‘real politics’.