quibble. This edited volume is a must read for scholars and students of political science and international relations looking to understand the role of Saudi Arabia in the world

Jonathan Fisher and Nina Wilén, in their informative book African Peacekeeping (2022), make a valuable contribution to readers interested in international peacekeeping in Africa and globally. The book focuses on “peacekeeping by Africans” (p. 3) and explores African states as actors in peacekeeping operations and the implications of this to relationships amongst other African states. It also surfaces the relationships of these African peacekeeping actors with other non-African parties like multilateral organizations such as the United Nations and other states that play varied roles in peacekeeping operations around the world. It harnesses the vast and rich research experiences of both scholars and draws its analysis from empirical materials collected over time and from various relevant actors both in and outside of Africa. It is a timely book, as the authors acknowledge that African countries are sending more peacekeeping troops in various war contexts around the world, including within Africa (p. 2). The book is well structured, and the arguments in each chapter are well linked to each other. There is ample evidence from a wide range of research on peacekeeping and also from other relevant scholarly literature in politics for instance. Readers will appreciate the introductory chapters that provide a chronological analysis of the evolution of African Peacekeeping and the other sections that are organized in well-articulated themes. Fisher and Wilén provide two compelling arguments concerning their approach and analysis. The first, and the one that readers will find both compelling and innovative, examines how traumatic colonial legacies remain one of the important factors that influence “undemocratic and unaccountable culture” (p. 31) in certain aspects of contemporarymilitaries across the continent. Chapter 1 therefore offers a much welcome contribution to the study of international peacekeeping in Africa, a long-term perspective that goes beyond framing African peacekeeping story to the post–Cold War period. The data presented on the overview of African peacekeeping is informative and is analyzed in the introduction and chapter 1. The second argument is equally compelling, presenting evidence to examine how African states’ participation in peacekeeping operations informs domestic and foreign policy and shapes relationships amongst African countries and with the outside world. In chapter 2 examples are given of Uganda as “one of a number of African states which have successfully leveraged extensive and enduring support from major powers” (p. 80) in the fight against terrorism. Many other cases analyzed in this chapter provide evidence of these strategic partnerships that have influenced how international peacekeeping operations have evolved in past decades and influenced foreign policy interests of African states and other actors. The examples provided in chapter 5 on professional development courses and other trainings offered by wealthy countries show how the benefits go beyond the states to impact positively individual soldiers’ careers who risk their lives on the ground when deployed. The analysis of the dynamics of African peacekeepers, for instance in Rwanda during the 1994 genocide, is informative and is a welcome addition to other scholarly works that have recently explored this period (Reggers, Rosoux, and Mwambari, “In Memory of Peacekeepers: Belgian Blue Helmets and Belgian Politics,” International Peacekeeping 29 [2], 2022). The reader will also find that each chapter can be read on its own, given that there are clear arguments and a rich analysis of various players in peacekeeping. In chapter 4, for instance, the authors provide a holistic examination of the contradictions of the African Union’s (AU’s) identity as it is influenced, on the one hand, by “key documents, like the charter” (p. 130) for the Africa Peace and Security Architecture (APSA) and, on the other hand, practices that are based on competing national interests. In developing such analysis, the book revisits and connects to old debates in literature across disciplines on the choice between the AU and regional organizations that continues to produce multiple identities on the continent instead of unity. In this context the authors show how states such as Nigeria continue to organize peacekeeping operations through Regional Economic Communities (RECs) like the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) instead of on the African Union or the UN level to sustain its influence as a hegemonic power within the western African region. In this chapter, as is the case in chapter six, the authors brilliantly elevate the analysis of African peacekeeping from state level to continental level. The reader will find the comparative approach to examining how peacekeeping decisions inform practices that result in tensions at the national, regional, and international levels, valuable for analyzing the recent politics of peacekeeping inMozambique. The deployment of peacekeepers in Mozambique provides an example that deepens the argument regarding multiple identities that the authors make in chapter 4. Mozambique, based on its own national interests, invited Rwandan peacekeepers on a bilateral basis in July 2021, but without mandate from the AU or the United Nations. In addition, both Mozambique and Rwanda acted against advice from leaders of