The authors of these studies have wished both to review the significant changes which have taken place in the region in the ten years that have followed the publication of West African States. Failure and Promise (John Dunn, ed., Cambridge University Press, 1978) and to assess the shifts that have taken place in the scholarly analysis of these states over the same period. The studies have emerged from a small conference held at the School of Oriental and African Studies in June 1987, where scholars were invited to contribute papers on particular countries of the region. Contributors were asked to use narrative as the foundation of their analysis, so that the volume might be a useful text book as well as a contribution to a review of the nature of the state and political processes in Africa.

A decade's political change in the region is marked in one way by the inclusion of new areas of interest: the chapters on Chad, Burkina Faso and Cameroon are intended to match the changing concerns in the field with data on areas untouched in the previous volume. Both the introduction and the conclusion suggest the salient thematic shifts: these include the remarkable retreat of dependency theory and Marxian analysis and the rise of free-market theorising on the part both of governments and of scholars.