The State of the Nations: Constraints on Development in Independent Africa

The State of the Nations is a collection of essays evaluating the political, social, and economic development of independent African states in the 1960s. The effort to employ the notion of constraint as a conceptual tool in analyzing African politics reflects an attempt to move away from evaluative terms such as development and modernization or decay and breakdown. Development, which has an implicit suggestion of social progress and constitutional government, seems inappropriate for the stu...