Introduction: observing the business of power --The political marketplace: politics is business and business is politics -- The Horn of Africa: subcontinental war in three acts -- Darfur: the auction of loyalties -- Sudan: managing the unmanageable -- South Sudan: the boom and bust of a speculative bubble -- Somalia: a post-apocalypse workshop -- Somaliland: a business-social contract -- Eritrea: a museum of modernism -- Ethiopia: is state-building still possible? -- Transnational patronage: shadow globalization and the regional marketplace -- The politics of ideas: perplexed intellectuals and policymakers.