In The Postcolonial State in Africa, Crawford Young offers an informed and authoritative comparative overview of fifty years of African independence, drawing on his decades of research and first-hand experience on the African continent.

Young identifies three cycles of hope and disappointment common to many of the African states (including those in North Africa) over the last half-century: initial euphoria at independence in the 1960s followed by disillusionment with a lapse into single-party autocracies and military rule; a period of renewed confidence, radicalisation, and ambitious state expansion in the 1970s preceding state crisis and even failure in the disastrous 1980s; and a phase of reborn optimism during the continental wave of democratisation beginning around 1990. He explores in depth the many African civil wars-especially those since 1990- and three key tracks of identity, Africanism, territorial nationalism, and ethnicity.

Only more recently, Young argues, have the paths of the fifty-three African states begun to diverge more dramatically, with some leading to liberalisation and others to political, social, and economic collapse-outcomes impossible to predict at the outset of independence.