Ghassan Khatib was a part of the Palestinian leadership and was present during peace negotiations on the Israeli-Palestinian issue in Madrid and Washington DC. His book gives original insight and accounts from the 1990s peace process including those of the Washington bilateral negotiations and crucial internal Palestinian meetings. Alaa Tartir finds it is an inspiring book for a very uninspiring peace process.

Palestinian Politics and the Middle East Peace Process: Consensus and Competition in the Palestinian Negotiating Team. Ghassan Khatib. Routledge. 2011.

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After more than two decades of the Palestinian-Israeli negotiations and peace process, sustainable and genuine peace seems to be more unattainable than ever. The signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993 was supposed to conclude in 1999 with the emergence of an independent Palestinian state but for many Palestinians, hopes for an state have all but evaporated with the failure of the peace process, the expansion of Israeli settler communities and continued occupation of the Territories.

It is not surprising then, that many scholars, students and commentators seek to understand and analyse why the peace process has been largely unsuccessful. Was it doomed to failure from the beginning? What went wrong, why and by whom? How did intra-Palestinian politics and styles of governance interact with and affect the peace process? And most importantly, what lessons can be learnt from two decades of negotiations and a failed peace settlement?

These are the set of questions which Palestinian politician and scholar Ghassan Khatib has provided interesting, detailed and historically embedded answers to in Palestinian Politics and the Middle East Peace Process: Consensus and Competition in the Palestinian Negotiating Team. Building on his direct experience as a member of the Palestinian delegation to the peace negotiation, the author examines to what extent the composition and behaviour of the Palestinian negotiating team had an impact on the process and outcomes of the negotiations with Israel, from Madrid to Oslo II between 1991 and 1997. Khatib provides a background deliberation through the lenses of the leadership role and the structure and outcome of the peace process, and examines the emergence and nature of the Palestinian leadership since 1949.

The author also provides a detailed analysis for the 1993 Oslo agreement and examines the performance of the Palestinian delegation in negotiating peace through the inside-outside leadership dichotomy. The author ends his analysis by reflecting on the implementation of the Declaration of Principles (DoP), the emergence of the new Palestinian elite and the ultimate consequences of the failure of the peace process.

Khatib argues that “there was no significant political difference between the inside and outside as distinct groups during the peace process” from Madrid until the Interim Agreement in 1996 (p. 22). The relationship between the inside and outside leaderships was complementary: the inside needed the legitimacy and political access of the outside, and the outside needed the unity and representation of the inside (p. 176). It is this argument which makes the book distinctive from other scholarly work in the field. Khatib notes that it was the contrasting realities out of which these two leaderships were born led them to subsequently employ different approaches and priorities (p. 169).

The book makes it clear that the structure and open-ended nature of the process and its effect on the behaviours of the leadership, the vagueness of the terms of reference, the restriction on Palestinian representation, and the partial role of the sponsor all contributed to the weakness of the Palestinian leadership, and its negotiation performance (p. 170). This in turn, lead to an increase in violence and strengthened the opposition, reducing the leadership’s popularity and allowing it to be further exploited in negotiations (p. 172).

While the composition and behaviour of the Palestinian leadership were not the only factors that had an impact on the process and outcome of negotiations, Khatib’s overall conclusion is that the continuous changes in the composition of negotiating teams, in particularly the marginalization and exclusion of the internal leadership, displaced previously complementary relations and led to poor negotiating performance and ultimately flawed agreements. These, in turn led to a still poorer performance in the on-going negotiations.

The strength of this book is that it is inspired by the participation in the peace negotiations and the author, being in the Palestinian ‘political kitchen’, holds a wealth of insider insights. Additionally, through the historical analysis, the author provides unique access to details of the early beginnings of the peace process, allowing readers to link old events with current trajectories. Hence, the book serves as an eye-opener to better understand the deteriorating conditions of today due to disastrous decisions that were taken in the past.

The book does suffer from a few drawbacks. Readers may notice various, sometimes unjustifiable, repetitions throughout the book and particularly in its first half, in addition to the various introductory statements which sometimes harm the flow of the arguments. When discussing the existing literature, the author tends to present that which he believes is “right” and “wrong”, which is problematic in its subjectivity. Finally, because the book allows for a wealth of historical and contextual background, this allows less space for further analysis, discussions and reflections.

Overall, this book adds a significant and distinctive contribution to the scholarly work on Palestine. It provides valuable insights into what went wrong over the last two decades in the Middle East peace process and what can be learnt for the future. It is an inspiring book for an uninspiring peace process.

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Alaa Tartir is a PhD candidate and researcher in international development studies at the Department of International Development, at the London School of Economics, LSE and he is researching governance, security, aid and development issues. He is also a project coordinator and research assistant at the Department of International Development, LSE. Alaa is a policy advisor for The Palestinian Policy Network, Al-Shabaka, research fellow of the Palestine Economic Policy Research Institute, and a research fellow at The Palestinian American Research Center. He publishes regularly on Open Democracy. Read more reviews by Alaa.

When political science scholars first asserted the essential connection between political parties and democracy, most of the world’s democracies were parliamentary. Yet by the dawn of the twenty-first century, most new democracies had directly elected presidents. David Samuels and Matthew Shugart provide a theoretical framework for analyzing variation in the relationships among presidents, parties, and prime ministers across the world’s democracies, revealing the important ways that the separation of powers alters party organization and behaviour. Jack Blumenau applauds the authors’ enormous data collection project, which examines biographical information of all prime ministers and presidents in democratic countries from 1945 to 2007.

Presidents, Parties and Prime Ministers: How the Separation of Powers Affects Party Organization and Behaviour. David J. Samuels and Matthew S. Shugart. Cambridge University Press. July 2010.

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Do political constitutions matter for democratic quality? As the green shoots of democracy struggle to break through in many parts of the Arab world, such questions have renewed relevance for policymakers. However, the comparative literature on presidential and parliamentary systems has largely focussed on the differential impact of constitutional choice on the survival of democracy. While such research constitutes a valuable normative endeavour, an impasse has formed between those such as Linz, who believe that presidentialism is ‘perilous’ for democratic survival, and those who believe such fears are overstated, such as Power and Gasiorowski or Cheibub, Pzworski and Saigh. The intractability of this impasse constitutes a significant challenge to institutionalist accounts of comparative politics, and a failure to offer guidance on this most pressing issue could expose the discipline to accusations of buck-passing.

The publication of this new volume by David Samuels and Matthew Shugart – two heavyweights of the comparative presidential literature – is therefore a welcome progression, as it attempts to move beyond the dichotomous ‘better-or-worse’ debate, and instead focuses on the effect of constitutional structure on a crucial aspect of democratic politics: political parties.

Samuels and Shugart argue that parties and party politics differ under different constitutional formats. As they put it, political parties are presidentialized by the separation of powers. They approach their investigation through the lens of principal-agent analysis. In all principal-agent relationships, principals who hire agents face potential agency losses – situations in which the agent’s actions diverge from the principal’s interests. By characterizing the relationship between a political party and the executive actor (prime minister or president) as that of a principal and an agent, they argue that political parties in presidential systems are more prone to agency loss than are parties in parliamentary systems. The two most innovative expressions of this argument are presented in chapters three and four of the book.

Chapter three considers the problem of adverse selection, and argues that parties in all systems are faced with the difficulty of selecting as leader both a loyal party servant and an election-winning figurehead. In parliamentary systems, the skills needed to win prime ministerial office often correlate highly with the skills that makes one a good party servant – such as the ability to coordinate the party’s legislative contingent, and embodying the party vision. By contrast, in presidential systems, the qualities that make a potential candidate useful for pursuing party goals are not necessarily the same as the qualities needed to win a presidential election – such as having a widely appealing and suprapartisan public image. At heart, the argument here is that when voters play a direct role in electing national leaders, parties are forced to choose leaders who will appeal to the mass electorate, even if these individuals are less likely to reliably and consistently pursue party goals.

In a herculean data collection effort examining biographical information of all prime ministers and presidents in democratic countries from 1945 to 2007, the authors show that presidents overwhelmingly tend to have weaker ties to their parties than do prime ministers. Presidents are more typically ‘outsiders’, having less experience in high profile party jobs prior to their ascendance to high office. Thus, they suggest, the adverse selection problems that plague presidential parties lead to significant agency loss, as ‘outsiders’ presidents are more likely to stray from the party line and pursue policies that differ from the goals of their principals.

Chapter four deals with moral hazard – the phenomenon that occurs when an agent violates the terms of a contract after it has been signed. Why is this particularly a problem for presidential parties? For Shugart and Samuels, presidential parties lack a mechanism through which they can get rid of a leader who violates a party-president contract whilst that leader is still in office. While parliamentary parties are able to fire their leaders through practices of parliamentary deselection, presidents are virtually immune to intraparty deselection attempts. Thus, once gaps between principal and agent have emerged, the absence of a confidence vote in presidential systems means that there is no way for presidential parties to rid themselves of disobedient agents – again increasing agency losses relative to parliamentary parties. They show that nearly a third of prime ministers leave office due to intra-party politics, where only one in over two-hundred presidential changes resulted from intra-party politics. These arguments lead to a damning conclusion of presidential constitutions. In perhaps the strongest expression of their view of presidentialism, Samuels and Shugart suggest that “responsible parties as conceived in the literature cannot exist under the separation of powers.”

However, there are a number of weaknesses that crucially undermine this relentlessly negative conclusion. First, a lack of high-profile party experience does not necessarily imply that “prospective agents will fail to pursue their promised course of action.” For example, recent expert survey evidence by Wiesehomeier and Benoit has shown that the ideological differences between presidents and their parties vary according to institutional variation within the presidential regime-type such as the concurrence or non-concurrence of elections or the size of the electoral districts.

Likewise, parties themselves can institute sub-constitutional reforms in order to further mitigate adverse selection problems. Primary elections are designed for the express purpose of allowing political parties to choose a presidential candidate who represents their interests, and candidates must appeal to this party constituency before they are able to appeal to a national constituency. These types of institutional innovations are ignored by Shugart and Samuels in their discussion, but constitute important and commonly used remedies to some of the problems that they associate with presidential systems.

Finally, Shugart and Samuels also overlook potential remedies to the problem of moral hazard. If agents fail to adhere to a contract, then the principal can either dismiss the agent or the principal can build safeguards into the original contract which limit the freedom that the agent has to operate within. One such safeguard would be for the party to control important institutions that form a part of the legislative process, such as the ability to manage the legislative agenda. If the presidential party controls the tools of legislative agenda setting, the problem of moral hazard is sharply reduced, as legislative behaviour on behalf of the president that runs contrary to the preferences of the president’s party is largely irrelevant, as the party can always block unpopular presidential proposals (Cox and McCubbins, 2005).

Schattschneider tells us that “modern democracy is unthinkable save in terms of political parties” and thus the impact that constitutional choice has on parties is certainly a subject worthy of study. However, while Shugart and Samuels take a step forward by narrowing the focus to this singular facet of democracy, they remain trapped by the dichotomous distinction between regime-types. By failing to disaggregate their independent variable beyond a parliamentary/presidential dummy, this study leads to an unconvincing and unsatisfying conclusion. Our normative discussions and prescriptions for constitutional design ought to concentrate as much on the internal workings of democratic systems as on the choice between presidential and parliamentary regimes.

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Jack Blumenau completed an MPhil in European Politics and Society at the University of Oxford in 2012, having graduated from the LSE with a degree in Government in 2010. He is currently working towards a PhD in Political Science at the LSE. His research interests include legislative politics, party politics, the politics of the EU and the politics of the arts. Read more reviews by Jack.

There are currently between twenty and thirty civil wars occurring worldwide, while at a global level the Cold War has been succeeded by the War on Terror, which continues to rage a decade after 9/11. When we know how destructive war is in both human and economic terms, why do wars continue for so long? Why do the efforts of aid organizations and international diplomats so often fail? David Keen investigates why conflicts are so prevalent and so intractable, even when one side has much greater military resources. Reviewed by Meike de Goede.

Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars is More Important Than Winning Them. David Keen. Yale University Press. May 2012.

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In 2009, the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Tutsi rebels in the east of the country signed a peace deal, under which the rebel movement changed into a political party. It was hoped that the deal would generate much needed peace and stability, but by April 2012, the rebel movement mutinied from the Congolese national army and launched a new movement, plunging the troubled eastern DRC into a whole new cycle of violent conflict.

For those who have not been following events in the DRC, recent events such as this bear a striking resemblance to many other violent events which have taken place there since the early 2000s. Many are left wondering whether these cycles of violent conflict can ever be put to an end. In this context of civilian and NGO desperation in the Congo, David Keen’s latest book Useful Enemies: When Waging Wars is More Important than Winning Them engages with the often heard sentiments that, apart from the local population, nobody actually wants peace. Keen’s book intellectually engages with these sentiments and aims to stimulate alternative ways of thinking about complexities such as those faced by the DRC.

The book builds on Keen’s earlier work about the hidden functions of war. In his latest book, Keen focuses not only on the economic functions of war but also on the psychological functions of violence and strategies of political manipulation. The book contributes to a growing and broadening literature on violent conflict that aims to rationalise what are often considered as irrational, brutal and ‘exotic’ wars unique for the development world.

Keen’s argument that wars serve other interests than merely defeating the enemy is in itself not new. What is particularly interesting is that Keen expands this perspective on conflict by including not just rebels but also counter insurgencies (governments) as well as foreign (Western) interventions, in both historic and contemporary cases. He uses a wide variety of case material including Sierra Leone, the DRC, Sudan, the Balkans War, the Vietnam War, the interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as WWII. In doing so, he takes away the exoticism of the argument: brutality and conflict driven by economic and political opportunism is not the exclusive domain of post-Cold War rebellions in the developing world. The book thus challenges naive ways of thinking about conflicts in terms of victims and perpetrators, good guys and bad guys, them and us. The reality of conflict is often more complex.

This perspective is highly relevant for understanding conflicts such as the one in the DRC. Ordinary Congolese people as well as other critical voices question the willingness of the Congolese government, rebel movements, neighbouring countries, Western powers and even the UN peacekeeping mission to end the conflict and round up the rebel movements. Keen’s book does not qualify or disqualify these suspicions about interests in maintaining the continuous state of conflict in the Congo. However, it does confront policy makers and members of the donor community with important questions about themselves and the actors they cooperate with in this context. It is therefore also a critique which is hard to deal with, as it has profound consequences for their engagements in these conflict environments. How can it be justified to invest in a state and its government through state-building programmes when its representatives are guilty of the manipulation of violence and shame, while they deliberately maintain conflict as a means to consolidate their power? These important dilemmas raise the principle of ‘do no harm’ to a whole new level.

But this is where some readers may encounter an important gap in Useful Enemies. A problem with much of the literature on the rationality of conflict and use of violence is that it focuses largely on elites, while ordinary people are reduced to passive victims of elite driven violence.

Keen makes an effort to bring ordinary people into the equation in the chapter on the psychological functions of violence. While an interesting contribution, some readers may find that it does not go far enough, as the agencies of ordinary people are represented only as coping strategies or responses to violence. Although it cannot be denied that ordinary people are often victims of the brutality of conflict, it is important to move beyond their victimisation. Many are not isolated from the conflict and cannot be considered in isolation from its political economy. Reconsidering the role of ordinary people is necessary for a more complete comprehension of conflict.

Even more so because the victimisation of ordinary people enables policy-makers to use the argument that projects are in the interest of the people, or that they invest in people. Implementing these projects often requires a form of cooperation with the government and other actors which may play a dubious role in the conflict environment, as Keen so aptly describes. Often, a less critical engagement with counterinsurgencies is chosen to enable the implementation of projects ailed to help the victimised people. A problematic blind spot is created, which becomes a dangerous pitfall.

Readers working in development may welcome a more careful consideration of how local people take part in the economic, political and psychological interests of conflict beyond their victimisation, which could provide better applied strategies that do less harm. There is currently developing a growing scholarship on the local and everyday agencies of ordinary people in the context of war and peace building, and a dialogue between Keen’s work and this research could certainly result in interesting outcomes.

Keen’s book challenges us to reconsider our way of understanding conflict and its purposes. Written in an easily approachable style, it is full of anecdotes and uses a minimum of academic jargon, making is a valuable and accessible read for a wider audience. Although it does not contain explicit policy guidelines, it has the potential to stimulate debate in policy-making circles and the donor community.

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Meike de Goede completed her PhD in International Relations at the University of St Andrews. Her research focuses on the interaction between local agencies and liberal peace building in Africa. She previously studied History at Leiden University, and Peace and Conflict Studies and Human Rights at Utrecht University. She currently lives in Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo, where she works in democratisation and development. Read more reviews by Meike.

Appearing more than twenty years after the revolutions in Central and Eastern Europe, this book takes stock not only of the changes but also the continuities in media systems of the region since 1989. To what extent are media institutions still controlled by political forces? To what extent are media markets operating in Central and Eastern Europe? Do media systems in Central and Eastern Europe resemble media systems in other parts of Europe? Paul Brighton finds a useful and informative set of insights into how our European neighbours’ media landscapes are not so very different from our own.

Central and Eastern European Media in Comparative Perspective. John Downey and Sabina Mihelj. Ashgate. February 2012.

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What happens to a country’s media system when a totalitarian Communist regime disappears? One’s first reaction, surely, is to assume that it becomes freer, less obviously controlled and more pluralistic. So far so good: but is there an accompanying price tag for that freedom?

The answer comes in different forms. The void left by abandoning what we might imagine to have been endless documentaries on collective tractor farming had to be filled somehow. It’s actually quite hard to work out precisely how big that void was, at least from John Downey and Sabina Mihelj’s recent collection, Central and Eastern European Media in Comparative Perspective. Understandably, the focus is on changes that have occurred since 1989; but a little more scene-setting about what exactly people in the former Communist regimes were watching, listening to and reading before the revolutions might have been useful, especially in the interests of the comparative research the book is championing.

The editors have consciously chosen to commission chapters from a selection of academics whose approaches are contrasting, starting from widely different premises. “In this book we have taken to heart the task of explaining why we have the media we have. Tied up with this is necessarily a critique of mediacentrism. If we wish to explain why the media are as they are we need to look at the outside of the media as well as inside.”

No-one can accuse them of failing to meet this objective. One or two of the chapters spend much more time on the broader societal and cultural changes within nations as a whole, focusing only relatively briefly on the changing media landscapes towards the end of their pieces.

The most satisfying essays are those which manage to harness the sense of an overarching argument, diagnosing the fundamentals of national political, cultural and economic change; and which then proceed to a fine level of detail in explaining how this relates to, and is represented in, the respective media structures. Karol Jakubowicz’s essay is particularly effective at synthesising previous research on the differences in pace of political reform, and relating this to media regulation. The countries that followed a distinctively southern European or “Mediterranean” model of change (Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Serbia and Albania) are reasonably convincingly described as democratic. An intermediate group (Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan) is seen as oscillating between semi-democratic and semi-authoritarian. A third group, meanwhile, remains authoritarian (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan and Belarus).

The effects on their respective media regulation systems are then well and precisely drawn. The paths of “competitive politics” with its resulting media pluralism; the ambiguities of oligarchisation, involving self-censorship and vested interests; and the return to outright censorship are traced accordingly.

Other chapters provide similarly useful detail on the effects of transnational ownership. Not the straightforward Americanisation, or Murdoch “capture” that some might imagine, but a more European picture. Big players such as CME (Central European Media Enterprises), Axel Springer and others are increasingly dominant in the ownership patterns of Eastern European media. What are called “clone” media easily acquire prominent positions in the marketplace. So, for example, take a successful German product like “Bild”, clone it in Poland under a title such as “Fakt”, and Bob (or Axel) is your uncle! Even better, soften the market first by introducing harmless hobby journals such as “Computer Bild” or “Auto Bild”!

There are also usefully detailed chapters on how media regulation works in the emerging democracies. So who are the baddies here? Is it the USA and the global quangos such as the World Trade Organisation? Perhaps. “The US Ambassador to Hungary put pressure on the Czech Republic not to introduce quotas stipulated in the Television without Frontiers Directive…. Consequently… the minimum European works quota was not introduced.” So, does this mean that Eastern Europe has been brainwashed by a non-stop diet of Dallas and Dynasty?

Thankfully, it hasn’t quite come to that. Just as UK viewers prepare to welcome the somewhat wizened visage of Larry Hagman back to UK screens in a Twenty-First Century Dallas sequel – albeit on a considerably smaller channel than in its heyday – we are heartened to learn that home-produced television is making its own comeback in post-Communist Eastern Europe. One sometimes reads academic media analyses and yearns for a bit of detailed analysis of what people are actually watching, listening to and reading, as well as background analysis of social trends. Well, it duly arrives in this collection.

It is, perhaps, a little melancholy to discover that such timeless classics as Beverley Hills 90210 and Baywatch dominated the Slovakian viewing market in 1994; and that E.R. ruled in Bulgaria just as the immortal Mr Hagman, in his J.R. Ewing Stetson, was cock of the walk in the Czech Republic two years later. However, by 2007, Slavi’s Show, a home-grown variety programme, was top of the ratings in Bulgaria; while the domestically-produced soap, the intriguingly-named Surgery in the Pink Garden, swept all before it in the Czech Republic. Moreover, the tyranny of the imitation reality television format hasn’t quite duplicated itself to a standstill as it may now be doing here.

As often, there is plenty about newspaper ownership and consumption, and a welcome insight from Vaclav Stetka, into television viewing; but not much about radio or (perhaps understandably) new media. There is some discussion of the changing role of public service broadcasting across a range of countries; but little clarity as to where, if at all, radio fits into the pattern. A pity, because, with those exceptions, this is a useful and informative set of insights into how our European neighbours’ media landscapes are not so very different from our own.

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 Paul Brighton is Head of Department of Media and Film at the University of Wolverhampton. He grew up in Wolverhampton. He attended Wolverhampton Grammar School, and won an Open Scholarship to Trinity Hall, Cambridge. He got a First in English and, after postgraduate research at Cambridge, worked for the media. He was a BBC Radio presenter for twenty years, before becoming Head of Broadcasting and Journalism at University of Wolverhampton. His book “News Values” was published by SAGE in 2007. He is now Head of Media, Film, Deaf Studies and Interpreting; and his next book “OrIginal Spin: Prime Ministers and the Press in Victorian Britain” will be published by I.B. Tauris next year. Read reviews by Paul.

South Africa is a country poorly understood in the wider world. Martin Plaut and Paul Holden believe that the two main views of the country that persist in the international consciousness – that after the end of apartheid South Africa’s problems were at an end, and that a coterie of criminals is turning it into another Zimbabwe – are both highly inaccurate. Who Rules South Africa? provides a balanced look at the country and points to the real centres of power, which do not include Parliament. Reviewed by Sue Onslow.

Who Rules South Africa? Martin Plaut and Paul Holden. Biteback Publishing. 2012

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In the centenary year of the formation of the African National Congress (ANC) and with all eyes on President Jacob Zuma as he prepares to fight for his political life at the ANC elective conference in Mangaung  this December, Who Rules South Africa? has been published at the perfect time to look again at South African contemporary politics. The shooting of 34 miners at Lonmin’s Marikana site in August 2012 also dramatically underlines the need for a sophisticated understanding of the complexities of power in South Africa. The authors, Martin Plaut (Africa editor, BBC World Service News) and Paul Holden, ask what the driving force of change is in today’s South Africa. Is it the participatory politics of unions and civic organisation? The party as the revolutionary vanguard for socio-economic transformation? Class interest? Self-interest? Criminal interest? As this book points out in its detailed exposé of the structure and strings of power, South African democracy is not under terminal threat, but the warning signs are there.

The authors, two highly respected commentators, combine domestic and international perspectives and use a wide range of secondary sources, speeches, policy documents, investigative journalism of the fiercely independent South African press, and their own extensive personal interviews, to provide a damning indictment of the manipulations of power from the hopeful dawn of 1994 onwards. The ANC was always going to have a revisionist press, as the liberation movement and its leaders were proved to have feet of clay and the toxic legacies of the apartheid era proved more enduring and difficult to combat than was originally hoped. The authors do not find the increasingly vicious struggles for power between the different factions over the last decade at all surprising, given the Alliance’s sometimes “schizophrenic components”. The tensions within the Tripartite Alliance of the ANC, Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), and the South African Communist Party (SACP) played out in informal councils where the real discussions took place, are set against the background historical context of the complex and multilayered strands of the liberation movement. The authors chart the erosion of the democratic foundations of power, the silencing of political debate including attempts to muzzle South Africa’s fiercely independent print media and interference with the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and the threats to the independent judiciary and attacks on the Constitutional Court – as the book makes clear, leading ANC officials fail to appreciate that no-one is above the law. Also covered are the dangers of erosion of a non-partisan civil service, the distortion of the role of the intelligence community and security services to serve party interest, and the leeching of ANC values as the party fails to deliver to its core constituencies.

There are two densely written chapters on the Arms Deal and the erosion of Parliamentary power; and the uses and abuses of intelligence. There is a wealth of detail here in the bombardment of names, acronyms, dates and details of competing agendas, but readers should persevere as the conclusions to these chapters pack a very large punch indeed. So too, the perverse and selfish agenda behind populist calls for nationalisation, to rescue an improvident and greedy narrow clique of new BBE oligarchs, behind the facade of ‘national empowerment’. To its detractors, the ANC is an object lesson in the Lord Acton maxim, ‘Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.’ Plaut’s chapter ‘Crime, Corruption and Connections’ expressly addresses this. The discussion of the land issue is thoughtful and detailed, as is the examination of the causes and consequences of service delivery failure.

The ANC’s parliamentary majority and claimed legitimacy as the country’s liberator, ‘has insulated it from the need to too rapidly respond to civil society campaigns. ‘ But legitimate socio-economic pressures are building, and cannot be ignored. The ANC may be more able now to draw on the resources of the state to maintain power, but as Plaut and Holden point out, ‘the possibility that thousands of frequently violent community protests over local state failure might coalesce into a widespread popular revolt against (its) uses and abuses’. ANC’s modus operandi as a clandestine and conspiratorial clique before the party evolved into a mass movement has left a disturbing inheritance: among some ANC sections, the tendency to ruthlessness and brutality are embedded. The recent assassination of ANC delegate, Wandile Mkhize, illustrates that when challenged, such political cultures fall back on established practices of coercion and stifling of debate. (This continues to contrast sharply with the UDF legacy of political internal debate and self-criticism.)

Recent political commentators since the August shootings at Marikana have repeatedly emphasised South Africa is a powder keg, with detailed and disturbing reports of police brutality, and trade union rivalry, violence and intimidation. The voice of the ANC’s critics is swelling, as the power centres jostle for influence: in a country that values free speech, former ANC Youth League leader, Julius Malema cannot be muzzled. The events at Marikana, followed by wildcat strikes at other mining installations, underline the political dilemmas of the trade unions: the ACMU’s militancy is born of both frustration, and organisational weakness. But will the broader COSATU organisation reassert its autonomy in South African politics – the ‘workists’ against the ANC’s ‘populists’ – and be energised to form an alternative party of the Left? (Interestingly the SACP which has taken an increasingly dim view of elements of the ANC’s ‘’parasitic relationship with white business” did not condemn Lonmin & the mine’s management in last month’s shootings.) The Democratic Alliance is positioning itself in the Western Cape – but needs ‘a core economic message people can relate to’ if it is to break significantly into national politics, as well as to cast off completely its image as the party of the white elite.

The book’s conclusion stresses the continuities in South Africa’s political life: “South Africa remains what it has been since 1948: a one-party state, with democratic trimmings”. The ANC wields power within a broad alliance, and is itself a broad church. The power brokers and ruling forces within South Africa are increasingly challenged. The frictions between the ANC as representative of the increasingly conservative aspirational African middle class, and its left wing allies, look set to intensify. Will Zuma be able to rely on his previous trump card – a supportive and pliant intelligence security sector – in the run up to Mangaung, with the South African police under intense observation and criticism following the Marikana shootings? Growing union militancy will also put the spotlight on the powerful player of white business, but the new Black Economic Empowerment (BBE) moguls are also increasingly hate figures for the have-nots in South African society. Add into this potent and explosive mix, a new social movement, another grand corruption scandal, a surge in DA electoral support, as Holden and Plaut make clear, the ground could shift rapidly under their feet. But the power brokers and new power centres will not go down without a fight. The overhead sign remains: Turbulence Ahead.

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Sue Onslow is a former lecturer in the International History Department and co-Head of the Africa International Affairs Programme at the LSE. She is a specialist in British foreign policy and decolonization in sub-Saharan Africa, and Southern Africa in the Cold War era. She is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, as co-Investigator of a major AHRC funded project on the history of the modern Commonwealth. Read more reviews by Sue.