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Philip Roessler. Ethnic Politics and State Power in Africa. The Logic of the Coup-Civil War Trap. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. 389 pp. Maps. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. $110.00. Cloth. ISBN: 978-1107176072.

Why do heads of African states often exclude leaders of other ethnic groups from political power, knowing that this strategy can lead to large-scale political violence? Philip Roessler’s Ethnic Politics and State Power in Africa answers this question and offers readers an elegant and insightful discussion of coups, civil war, and ethnic politics. Roessler’s persuasive analysis points to problems rooted in the informal institution of power-sharing. He walks readers through the dilemma faced by African executives in weak bureaucratic states: the coup-civil war tradeoff. A leader can share governing roles with leaders from other ethnic groups, which enables him to gain access to those rivals’ political networks. Lacking formal institutions to monitor and control the population beyond the capital, this alliance provides the regime with greater societal control and state reach. However, it also opens the possibility that these rivals may accumulate enough power to remove the leader in a coup. Conversely, a leader can choose to exclude leaders of rival groups and their networks, but this strategy risks making the regime more vulnerable to the threat of insurgency. This vulnerability stems not only from the grievances of marginalized co-ethnics, but also from the weakened “counterinsurgency capability” of the state (55). Without brokers embedded in these excluded networks, regimes have limited information or social control to prevent insurgency in these areas. Roessler argues, “Civil wars are the manifestation of the political strategies rulers choose to coup-proof their regimes from rival networks of violence specialists and consolidate their hold on sovereign power” (19). The author adopts a nested research design, which combines interviews tracing political decision-making with quantitative analysis to test the generalizability of his strategic theory of civil war. First, Roessler leverages interviews with different political actors from the Darfur region of Sudan to describe political events in the region between 1989 and 2003. He details how Omar al-Bashir and Ali Osman Taha’s fear that Hassan al-Turabi’s network would take over central government led to a regime split along ethnoregional lines (149). As a result, the regime lost a network of brokers