Herbst claims that the state-building struggle in Africa lays on its geographic conditions. Africa had low population means so it was more expensive for states to exercise control over them since they could not rely on tax collection. Furthermore, the varied environmental conditions and the large amounts of open land make difficult to exert control over distance.

Herbst also claims that there were three sets of issues when building states in Africa: cost of expanding the domestic power infrastructure, the nature of national boundaries, and the design of state systems.

Moreover, Herbst claims that the transition from colonial to independent Africa did not have much effect on power structure since there were the same challenges than before and similar strategies were being used.