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The World Bank and IMF launched the Poverty Reduction Strategy Initiative in the context of longstanding criticisms of their structural adjustment programmes. This article examines the process of formulating Ghana's Poverty Reduction Strategy Paper (PRSP) from two perspectives. From the perspective of reforming the Bretton Woods institutions, it assesses the extent to which the PRSP approach alters the lending practices of these institutions in Ghana. From the perspective of understanding policymaking in highly indebted, aid-dependent African countries, it reveals the multiple interfaces of politics in such countries produced by relations among and within donors/creditors, the government and non-governmental actors. Its conclusions echo the growing body of literature critiquing PRSPs, and emphasise the constraints which the foreign aid regime places on democratic governance.

REVIEW ESSAY: CONTROVERSY WITHIN THE CATACLYSM Lieutenant Abdul Joshua Ruzibiza. Rwanda: L'histoire secrete. Paris: Editions du Panama, 2005. 494 pp. Maps. euro22. Paper. Pierre Pean. Noires fureurs, blancs menteurs. Paris: Mille et Une Nuits, 2005. 544 pp. 2 Maps. euro22. Paper. On the ever-expanding shelf-space occupied by books on Rwanda, those two clearly belong to the revisionist section. Both are decidedly out of joint with the commonly accepted Gourevitchian vision of ethnically defined bad guys sending the good guys to their graves in an orgy of genocidal killings. They each call into question such conventional pieties and point to the heavy responsibility of President Paul Kagame in creating the conditions that led to the ghasdy carnage. Their shared revisionist agenda notwitiistanding, it is difficult to imagine a more striking contrast than between Lt. Abdul Ruzibiza, a former officer and defector from Kagame's Rwanda Patriotic Front (RPF)-a member of the crack unit known as the Network Commando and assigned to the Department of Military Intelligence (DMI)-and Pierre Pean, a French journalist noted for the quality of his investigations of various and sundry scandals relating to the French presence in Gabon (in Affaires Africaines) and more recently for a devastating inquest into the inner circles and professional failings of Le Monde (in La face cachee du Monde, 2004). Their radically different backgrounds and personalities are palpably mirrored in the very different tone and format of their narratives. Ruzibiza's book is an extraordinarily detailed, sometimes day-by-day personal account of the author's participation in the RPF's military operations since the 1990 invasion, including the tactical maneuvers leading to, and preparing the ground for, the shooting down of President Habyalimana's plane on April 6. Pean's book reads like nodiing so much as a settling of scores. He glories in personal stabs at a broad range of political and academic personalities (such as the historian Jean-Pierre Chretien, excoriated for an entire chapter), journalists (Colette Braeckman of LeSoir and Marie-France Cros of La Libre Belgique), human rights activists (the late Xavier Verschave), philosophers (Andre Glucksman), and NGOs. Their alleged pro-FPR sympathies or pro-Tutsi biases are presumably sufficient grounds for indictment. To describe the book as polemical is the least that can be said of a diatribe that has been denounced as a scandal (most notably by Francois Soudan in "Le scadale Pean"). Yet, as we shall see, to dismiss it out of hand is unwarranted. Of the two, Ruzibiza's story is by far the more significant. His narrative-sandwiched between an illuminating preface by Claudine Vidal and a post-face by Andre Guichaoua-leaves few doubts in the reader's mind that Kagame bears a direct responsibility in the crash of the presidential plane. The author is meticulous in reporting on his battlefield experiences; he shows intimate familiarity with the RPF's operational code; and he is precise in his information about who did what, where, and when-and with surprisingly few scruples about naming names, places, and dates. All this produces a crushing body of evidence in support of his central argument: that the crimes committed by the FPR are no less horrendous than those attributed to the Hutu genocidaires. This was already made clear in 1995 by S. Desouter and F. Reyntjens' book Rwanda: Les violations des droits de I'homme (1995). Two years later a report by Physicians for Human Rights prepared for the U.S. House of Representatives International Relations Committee denounced the "widespread atrocities against civilian populations in eastern Congo" by Kagame's army (but failed to note that similar atrocities had been committed in Rwanda, according to a 1997 article by Thomas Lippman in the International Herald Tribune.) But Ruzibiza goes further, making his case in meticulous detail. …

Denis Herbstein. White Lies: Canon Collins and the Secret War against Apartheid. Cape Town: HSRC Press/Oxford: James Currey Publishers, 2004. xxi + 386 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £14.95. Paper. Roger Fieldhouse. Anti-Apartheid: A History of the Movement in Britain. A Study in Pressure Group Politics. London: The Merlin Press Ltd., 2005. xiv + 546 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Index. £20.00. Paper. £50.00. Cloth. These two accounts of the overseas humanitarian and solidarity groups that were founded in response to the increasing institutionalization of white minority rule, primarily in South Africa, can certainly be regarded as examples of what Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink have labeled "activists beyond borders" (Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks in International Politics, Cornell University Press, 1998). Mark Israel, in his scholarly treatise South African Political Exile in the United Kingdom (St. Martin's Press, 1999) uses the felicitous term "international solidarity lobbyists" (82). What characterized both the International Defense and Aid Fund (IDAF) and the Anti-Apartheid Movement (AAM) was that they attracted the attention of both British and South African exile activists, on the one hand, and South African government operatives and agents, on the other hand. Denis Herbstein is a South African-born journalist who wrote for The Cape Times and later moved to Britain, where he is on the staff of the The Financial Times. He began his biography of the Rev. Lewis John Collins, one of the four canons of St. Paul's Cathedral in London, as researcher for a Channel Four British television show on this topic produced by Paul Yule in 1993. Collins was a key British figure in the development and operation of the IDAF, which traced its origin to the Treason Trial Defense Fund in South Africa. IDAF's original aim was to provide funds to secure defense attorneys for those Africans who were charged with a wide array of infractions against the prevailing and increasingly remorseless internal security legislation that became an integral part of the apartheid system after 1948. Not unsurprisingly, the Pretoria regime served a banning order on the IDAF in 1966 which remained in force until 1990, so that South African defense attorneys would be subject to as much as ten years in prison if they were funded overtly by the IDAF. The title "White lies," which was also the title of the Channel Four documentary, refers to the plausible deniability of any IDAF funds reaching South African defense attorneys in these internal security trials. Neville Rubin, an exile South African lawyer whose late father, Leslie, was active in the South African Liberal Party before he immigrated to the United States, was the architect of a system of cutouts which hid the funding pipeline from the IDAF to the defense attorneys by using two layers of British legal firms and basically phantom trust funds sponsored by eminent left-leaning members of the British establishment who had a profound distaste for the apartheid judicial system. This James Bond-type of enterprise was never cracked by the South African regime, although suspicions existed about the system. Yet the IDAF was more than simply a well-camouflaged legal aid society. One of its two other tasks concerned welfare work for those near-destitute dependents of incarcerated Africans with whom a vast range of IDAF members in several Western European nations corresponded. Financial requests for aid were carefully vetted. The other task for which it was perhaps better known was as a fount of data on the status of white rule in Anglophone southern Africa. Indeed there is now a huge, indexed microfiche data bank of IDAF newspaper clippings at certain research libraries as a legacy of its information and research staff. …

POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GLOBALIZATION Cherry I Walker. Land-Marked: Land Claims and Land Restitution in South Africa. Johannesburg: Jacana Media; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xii + 292 pp. Abbreviations. Maps. Photographs. Tables. Appendixes. Endnotes. Bibliography. Index. $26.95. Paper. Aninka Claassens and Ben Cousins, eds. Land, Power and Custom: Controversies Generated by South Africa's Communal Land Rights Act. Published for the Legal Resources Centre. Cape Town: UCT Press; Athens: Ohio University Press, 2008. xv + 392 pp. DVD. Maps. Abbreviations, Contributors. Notes. Tables. References. Index. $34.95. Paper. These two books are indispensable additions to the core literature on land reform in South Africa. In their different approaches and structures, they both offer a creative mix of academic insights and the entrenched experience of activists, and of local case studies with a wealth of concrete sociological detail alongside broad discourses on modes of analysis on a national and continental scale. They each concentrate on one element of what Cherryl Walker refers to as "the three-legged cooking pot" of land reform policy initiated in 1994: the Restitution Programme and the attempt to reform land tenure in the former Ban tus tans, respectively. Neither covers the third leg of redistribution (the transfer of former white-owned farmland to black occupants), which is the leg that has received most attention and funding - although some of Cherryl Walker's general evaluations do extend to cover it. Indeed, her somewhat skeptical and cautious overall conclusions about the future of land reform apply to both redistribution and restitution plans. Walker's account of restitution provides a look back to the origins of today's problem in previous decades when the injustices of forced removals occurred. Her study is enriched by personal accounts from this period, when she was a "participant observer" working to resist the removals. She supplies a similar insider's account of the first stage of the restitution program, but this time from a position within the new state as the commissioner for land claims in Kwazulu-Natal. Since moving into academia after 2000, her work has continued to benefit from a third perspective, that of academic researcher. The book thus juxtaposes and interrelates the three elements and perspectives: emotive personal memories and indelible images of dispossession; a planner's account of the mechanisms and frustrations of restitution; and the evaluation of the record. The memories from long ago of a litde girl lost in a removal suggest the ways in which such incidents became the currency of a historical narrative at the heart of the rhetoric of national liberation; at the same time, they provide a measure of success or failure and serve to remind us of the complex reality covered up by the national myth. The approach embodied in this fusion of perspectives serves in turn as an explanation of why the restitution program failed. Over and above the occasional lack of political will, the over-bureaucratization and inefficiency, and the mistaken policy formulations (all of which are acknowledged in the account), Walker sees inherent conflicts in the dual goals of reversing injustice and stimulating rural development oriented toward the poor: limits to what can be achieved and how quickly these goals can be achieved via restitution. …

The arrest and prosecution in March 2006 of the former Liberian warlord-President Charles Taylor by the UN-backed Special Court for Sierra Leone, for war crimes including the recruitment and use of child soldiers, and the arrest and prosecution of the Congolese warlord, Thomas Lubanga Dyilo, by the International Criminal Court, accused of enlisting child soldiers in the DRC war, have raised expectations that finally international conventions and customary international laws protecting children in conflict zones will now have enforcement powers. But why has it taken so long to protect children in conflict situations despite the volume of international treaties and conventions? What do we know about the phenomenon of child soldiering, and why are children still routinely recruited and used in Africa's bloody wars? This article argues that against the background of unfolding events relating to prosecution for enlistment of child soldiers, the international community is beginning to wake up to the challenge of enforcing its numerous ‘paper protection’ instruments for the protection of children. However, a range of challenges still pose serious threats to the implementation and enforcement of the international conventions protecting children. Extensive research fieldwork in Liberia and Sierra Leone over three years reveals that the application of the restrictive and Western-centric definition and construction of a ‘child’ and ‘childhood’ raises inherent difficulties in the African context. In addition, most war-torn and post-conflict African societies are faced with the challenge of incorporating international customary laws into their domestic laws. The failure of the international community to enforce its standards on child soldiers also has to do with the politics of ratification of international treaties, in particular the fear by African governments of setting dangerous precedents, since they are also culpable of recruitment and use of child soldiers.

POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GLOBALIZATION Ian Scoones, Nelson M a ron g we, Biasio Mavedzenge, Jacob Mahenehene, Felix Murimbarimba and Crispen Sukume. Zimbabwe's Land Reform: Myths and Realities. Woodbridge, Suffolk: James Currey; Harare: Weaver Press; Auckland Park, South Africa: Jacana Media, 2010. xv + 288 pp. Bibliography. Index, f 16.99, $29.95, R1 75.00. Paper. One of the clear aims of this interesting and controversial book by Scoones et al. is to challenge five somewhat overstated myths that have dominated representations of Zimbabwe's post-2000 land reform. These are (1) that the land reform has been a total failure; (2) that the beneficiaries of this reform have been largely political "cronies" of the former ruling party, Zanu PF; (3) that there has been no investment in the new resetdement areas; (4) that agriculture in general is in complete ruins and has created chronic food insecurity; and (5) that the rural economy has collapsed. Challenges are made on the basis of detailed empirical research conducted over the past decade on "what has happened in the new resettiements" in Zimbabwe since 2000, and specifically in Masvingo Province in the country's dry southeast. The book's overall emphasis is explicidy on the "changing livelihoods of people who gained land" (31) - notably, not on those who didn't - and according to the authors, their data represent the "ground-level, field realities" that most others have failed to examine or acknowledge. These realities (in the Masvingo area, which differs markedly from many other parts of the country) are revealed through a combination of thematic lenses and linked sets of empirically oriented questions addressed in nine of the book's eleven chapters. (The other two are an introductory chapter that discusses debates on land reform and agrarian paths more generally, and a concluding chapter that revisits the five myths and explores "lessons" and policy priorities for supporting developments in the new resetdements.) Among other things, our attention is drawn to the varied origins and motivations of new setders and forms of land occupation across different sites, and the fragmented nature of the newly emerging agrarian structures (chapter 2). We learn of significant differentiation among households, substantial mobility on and off the schemes, including cross-border migration, and multiple livelihood strategies, which together have resulted in both "successes" and "failures" (chapters 3 and 8). Claims are made of unexpected if uneven levels of investment in plots, some production successes, the emergence of various agriculture-related enterprises, and new dynamics of "accumulation from below" (chapters 4, 5, and 10). This is despite a climate of sustained economic crisis and what is referred to as a "vacuum in policy thinking" (235) - here, the authors carefully side-step naming a highly party-politicized if not militarized policy sphere since 2000. In addition, we learn about the "highly complex rural labour market" (139) in the new resetdements (chapter 6), which the authors argue counters an over-emphasis by others on displacement and job losses. We also discover how land reform has altered the way in which "real markets" operate (chapter 7), with new commodity chains "opening opportunities for some and closing options for others" (149). Finally, the research reveals the complex struggles over territory, structure, and authority occurring in the new resetdements, and the surfacing of "hybrid" forms of governance that pose key challenges for state-making as well as for agricultural development (chapter 9). …

There is no shortage of research that purports to tell us something new about globalization and its varied impacts on domestic politics and international relations today. Moreover, students mining this literature continue to find a broad spectrum of opinion on globalization, from those offering a strong state thesis that seemingly willfully ignores the many interdependent relationships states are entangled in today, to those embracing a weak state thesis that accepts the erosion of state sovereignty as a given. Edward Cohen's new book avoids these analytical traps, as he navigates through both popular and academic debates on globalization to produce a well-rounded and useful picture of a prosperous and hegemonic United States nonetheless increasingly agitated and divided internally over trade, immigration, and language policy at the end of the twentieth century.

The linkage between nationalism, or to be more precise ethnonationalism, and international relations is now at the center of world politics. Following years in which this dimension has been neglected in our literature, the discipline has finally caught up with the reality that most of the conflicts taking place around the world are related to the politics of national or ethnic identity. To be sure, political science responded earlier to the call of Walker Connor (“Nation Building or Nation Destroying,” World Politics 24 [April 1972]: 319–55) and Anthony Smith ( The Ethnic Revival 1981) to supplant the notion of the integrated modern state with a more pluralistic approach. Following the end of the Cold War, international relations as a discipline had no choice but to pay attention to ethnicity. As expected, once the phenomenon was recognized, the literature grew extensively in both the theoretical and empirical areas. In recent years, even Michael Brecher's and Jonathan Wilkenfeld's prestigious International Crisis Behavior (ICB) worldwide data set had to turn around and adopt an ethnic variable. Patrick James and David Carment, using the ICB empirical stockpile, dedicated a large portion of their work to the ethnic dimension of international crises. Similarly, T. R. Gurr, also a former president of the International Studies Association (like Brecher), made an about-turn and focused his work on conflict through his Minorities At Risk (MAR) database on ethnicity. Kristen Williams's book is thus another attempt to integrate international relations theory and ethnic politics literature while basing it on empirical research. Despite some flaws, this book should be welcomed into the growing literature on nationalism and international conflict. It has two theoretical and four empirical chapters, each covering a different case, starting with Bismarck and German unification and proceeding to Bosnia, Kosovo, and Kashmir.

The editors of Bridges and Boundaries asked contributors—nine political scientists and eight historians, all of them North American—to reflect on their respective disciplines and the way they go about “the study of international events” (p. 1). We should notice a positivist disposition here. While contributors “share an interest…in the state, politics and war” (p. 2), events are the stuff of international relations. That the state, politics, and war are complex institutional phenomena perhaps not reducible to events points to conceptual issues that this volume fails generally to address. Instead, contributors discuss the many problems attending generalized explanation and empirical fit—theory and science—as if their shared interests imply a common stock of core concepts.

POLITICS, INTERNATIONAL RELATIONS, AND GLOBALIZATION Ambreena Manji, The Politics of Land Reform in Africa: From Communal Tenure to Free Markets. London and New York: Zed Books, 2006. vii + 149 pp. Notes. Index. £50.00. Cloth. £16.99. Paper. Ambreena Manji's book is an insightful analysis of the logic and agencies governing land reform in Africa in the age of neoliberal globalization. Building on World Bank reports and the new laws African governments are adopting to change land relations, the book examines the shift from a redistributive statist model, dominant until the 1970s, to one stressing the formalization of tenurial property, with the introduction of titling and registration, as the thrust of land reform on the continent. A legal scholar, Manji is interested in understanding why the law has come to play a central role in the definition of land reform. She argues that this innovation is consistent with a neoliberal project wherein the law acts as an instrument for the globalization of capitalist relations and the transfer of power from the local to the global, in this case removing the control over land policy from the nation-state and local communities to international "donors" and financial institutions, beginning with the World Bank. She also suggests that the formalization of land relations is an attempt to contain the struggles of rural people's movements which, faced with land grabbing by states, private companies, and local chiefs, and with the state's failure to address the historic injustices that are the legacy of colonialism, are demanding more secure access to land and opting for direct action through land occupations. In her view this pressure from below accounts for the populist language by which land reform is promoted, portraying it as a strategy for "poverty reduction." Manji points to the influence on the World Bank's land policy of Hernando De Soto's theory, according to which Third World rural populations are mired in poverty and economic stagnation because of the continuing existence of communal land tenure regimes which make for uncertain property relations, dampening incentives for investment and rural innovation. Hence the promise that titling and the expansion of land markets will open a new era of development and prosperity for African peasants, if only they could learn that land as such is a "dead asset" that becomes alive only when "brought to the bank" as collateral for the acquisition of rural credit and the financing of rural business. …