Mennonites and Post-Colonial African Studies edited by John M. Janzen, Harold F. Miller & John C. Yoder London: Routledge, 2021. Pp. 316. $160.00 (hbk).

Abstract

commitment to disentangling security outcomes from the form of political ordermaking, clearly noting that greater levels of security are no more closely associated with stability than with fluidity. This is a very important finding, helping to counterbalance the too-often uninterrogated assumption that formality and state-ness provide better outcomes for ordinary people than informality and non-stateness. The framework has the significant benefit of putting diverse actors and their jurisdictional claims-making on equal analytic footing, allowing not just a comparison across a range of cases, but an examination of farmers and teachers alongside warlords and international aid agencies to offer a textured picture of everyday security in often overlooked parts of the world. The book left me with a couple of questions. First, I wondered why Glawion chose (urban) space to conceptualise and identify distributions of jurisdictional claims, as compared with other potential axes –for instance, patterns of legal pluralism (see Benton’s Historical Perspectives on Legal Pluralism, Cambridge University Press,  and Massoud’s Shari‘a Inshallah, Cambridge University Press, ) or sites of surveillance (see Purdeková on ‘“Mundane Sights” of Power’ in African Studies Review, ). Intuitively, space seems helpful to understand conflict zones, crisscrossed by frontlines and no-go zones – but this assumption merits elaboration. Second, while the book purports to delink stable ordering, state control, and security, at times it implies the opposite, for instance, when Glawion notes that the outer circle is characterised by ‘unruly actors’, ‘security-related rumours and the use of violence’ (–). This left me wondering the extent to which the very real methodological constraints of researching (and thereby literally centring) comparatively safe zones might risk reproducing the very approach that the security arena seeks to critique – namely, the notion of a less-governed and more insecure hinterland (see, e.g. –). These questions point to the challenge of disentangling complex and contingent political dynamics, and their relation to the elusive concept of security. The book should be applauded for its efforts to investigate often-pathologised places on their own terms, its empirical richness and its theoretical ambition.