No complex cooking recipe has one single ingredient, as African wars or conflicts in the post-Cold War era do not have one single underlying cause. Paul D. Williams uses a chef analogy to explain in his well-researched, data-full and comprehensive book War & Conflict in Africa the different reasons why the continent explored an unprecedented rise in conflicts since the 1990s.

Williams researches the most repeated ingredients that sparked the flame of war, as well as the international response given to these, with a critique and pessimistic tone that lets the reader feeling that there’s little to do to help stop violence and prevent it from happening in the future. Perhaps the lack of a wide range of solutions is what misses in a book that is precise in locating the causes and responses to conflict in the last twenty years in Africa, but does not explore how its future can show up.

Overall, this book helps the reader to learn a lot about the complicated nature of war and conflict in Africa and it is useful for scholars and general public interested in gathering quantitative and qualitative knowledge on the causes that led post-Cold War Africa to be the bloodiest continent on Earth.