As the state has moved back to the centre of analysis of political change and conflict, increasing attention has focused on its rôle in forming new classes and in structuring the possibilities of class action. As Nelson Kasfir notes, both Marx and Weber ‘saw the vital role the state could play in consolidating the class position of a dominant social group’.1 Neither, however, saw the state as the inherent locus of the process of class formation and of class domination. For Marx, the state was typically the instrument of a ruling class whose origin and basis was in control over the means of production. For Weber, power, class, and status were potentially independent dimensions of stratification.

This study documents and evaluates the so-called ‘brain drain’ from sub-Saharan Africa to the United States during the period 1974–85. The objective is to use the available data to provide some insights into the rôle of this region in the international labour market for trained personnel. This is done by comparing the relative volume, pattern, and trend of migration to the United States from a sample of 17 countries against that for Africa as a whole, and against that for the world. The rationale for this kind of analysis rests on the need to determine the significance for all concerned of the growing transfer of technology, and to identify the factors which control the process.

The history of the past three decades in Africa would seem to confirm that the rôle of the military in political and economic development may no longer be considered transient. Armed interventions have become institutionalised, if not constitutionalised, in many African states. By December 1985 no less than 60 successful and 71 attempted coups d'état had occurred in 37 states since January 1956.1 Just as most of the first generation of African politicians chose ‘socialism’ to explain and justify their policies, so ‘revolution’ has become the rallying cry for the military leaders, even though they have often quickly been content just to ‘take over’, and not to transform, the previous civilian régime.

Both Eritreans and Ethiopians have been trying to sway international opinion about one of the most ticklish questions of modern nationalism which seems to defy rational analysis. This study attempts to present their contending views, and to find an interpretative framework for understanding this continuing conflict in the Horn of Africa.

In this historical conjuncture of profound socio-economic disorders, the condition of the peoples of the so-called periphery is as desperate as it has ever been. Understanding the making and nature of their predicament is certainly one of the most basic conundrums in development studies in general, and the study of Africa in particular. A useful way of looking at the continent's dilemma is to focus on two broad factors: structural constraints and subjective conditions. The first speaks to the complex of historical circumstances, habits, and rules bequeathed by the past – ‘the grid of inheritance’, to borrow from E. P. Thompson – and the overbearing logic of the contemporary global systems of production, exchange, and information. The second signifies political choices that are made as the battle with the past, the present, and for the future continues.