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.
Herbst begins this study with the claim that African states consolidated power through the nature of boundaries, the nature of the colonial and precolonial state system, and through evaluating the costs of extending power. In the early chapters, Herbst is clear in his argument that there was difficulty in consolidating authority for pre-colonial African leaders. Ultimately, state building a leadership power came through the building of infrastructure. Geography controlled population density which controlled where power was to be consolidated- though this was not a guarantee. Herbst continues to delineate how European states and African states differ in their creation. A primary argument for this line of thought emerged from understandings of war and conflict. While the colonial era gave rise to the boundaries of postcolonial African states, there was a surprising lack of major war between states to maintain power (as opposed to World Wars I and II in Europe).
In Chapter Four, Herbst argues that while European states grew land and maintained borers through mass warfare, postcolonial African states retained the partitions made by European colonists, but did retain their penchant for militarization and warfare to necessarily maintain this colonial map. Because of the extractive nature of colonization and the general difference in political economy, most African states opted out of wars because they were too expensive and would counteractively diminish the power that leaders had pried from colonists. Interestingly, while precolonial and postcolonial Africa had occurrences of civil wars, the large-scale war-mongering of European states did not reflect in postcolonial African states. Throughout the bo, Herbst makes the central claim that incentives for postcolonial African states did not direct them toward state building in a similar manner of European states because of their projected costs, the potential for losing power once gained, the toll of war after surviving perilous colonization, and the potential loss of support from the global community and foreign aid.