Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa. By Daniel N. Posner. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 337p. $70.00 cloth, 26.99 paper.

In the popular mind, ethnic conflict in Africa invariably revolves around deep-seated tribal identities and rivalries. Unfortunately, this perspective ignores the fact that Africans, like people everywhere, have multiple group identities. Although Daniel Posner singles out tribal affiliations as an important source of ethnic cleavage in Africa, he sees ethnicity as also including group identities based on race, clan, region, language, and religion. While much of the book provides a meticulous examination of the evolution of ethnic cleavage structures and ethnic politics in one African country, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa, as the title indicates, is far more than a detailed case study of Zambia, a former British colony known as Northern Rhodesia before independence. It is also a splendid primer as to how to systematically apply institutional analysis to explain political behavior.