Although analysts of African politics have focused mostly on the cities, civil conflict has played out mostly in the countryside. This pattern has become much starker in the past two decades. The 1990s and 2000s also drew observers’ attention to the role and weight of rural populations as voters in national elections. These shifts underscore the pressing need for tools to understand political dynamics in rural Africa, home to 60–70 percent of the continent's population but still largely indecipherable to most political analysts.

Drawing on literatures in the new institutional economics, property rights, and the political science institutionalisms, this book proposes a model of political and economic structure in rural Africa, how it varies at the subnational level, and how it shapes subnational- and national-level outcomes. In the countryside, local political arenas are defined largely by land tenure regimes, which we define as property institutions (or rules) governing landholding and land access. The shape and political effects of these property regimes are visible in the political expression of land-related conflict. These same property regimes go far in structuring local patterns of social stratification and hierarchy, ethnic conflict, electoral mobilization, and representation in the national political arena.