Constraining Dictatorship: from personalized rule to institutionalized regimes by Anne Meng Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. 278. $105 (hbk).

Abstract

neopatrimonialism’, and where Mamdani talks of the colonial bifurcated state, Tapscott reads postcolonial neopatrimonial bifurcated state (f). Wittingly or otherwise, the tendency here is to flatten the diversity of literature on the postcolonial state, and to suppose that all are varieties of neopatrimonialism. Early in the book, Tapscott rightly notes that ‘arbitrary governance is indeed tied to historical factors, such as the postcolonial nature of the state’ (). The book’s historical chapter (Chapter ), however, surprisingly locks the debate to the postcolonial period. If the distinctive feature of the state in Africa is its postcolonial nature, what is the place of colonial political modernity in the emergence of institutionalised arbitrariness? Asking such a question would definitely imply approaching this book’s research object differently, and questioning knowledge produced through a conception of postcolonial temporality as the beginning of time. Overall, if this book’s major downside is its limited historicisation of the state in Uganda, its strength is in its detailed engagement with various manifestations of state power in contemporary Uganda. In the latter, Tapscott makes an important contribution.