In his new book, The Ends of the Earth: A Journey at the Dawn of the Twenty-first Century, Robert Kaplan - the political travelogist who gave us "The Coming Anarchy" - speculates that perhaps "the forest has made the war in Liberia" since "in the forest...men tend to depend less on reason and more on superstition."

According to Will Reno's piece on Liberia in this issue, Kaplan has it half right; the forest has made the war in Liberia - not because it inspires superstition but because the sale of forest timber finances the Liberian warlords and their causes. And it is this explanation, not superstition, that can help make sense of the recent outburst of fighting in the Liberian capital. (Kaplan's views, however, undoubtedly set the Clinton administration' political perspective on Liberia that led to the evacuation of American citizens from the country because of the fighting and inspired major newspapers to see "anarchy" and "chaos" reigning with this outburst of fighting). Irrationality, it would seem, is more easily ascribed to the postmodern thinking of authors like Kaplan, who make man hostage to forces he cannot control, than to the profit-minded, power-seeking actors who inhabit the Liberian jungle.

This issue examines several other dysfunctional African states, and we also look at an earlier form of political dysfunction, apartheid South Africa, and how that country's political culture and the whites who shaped it fare today. We end with a discussion of one of the world's remaining nonstates, Western Sahara, whose emergence as an independent entity has been left in abeyance by the international community.