Although Ahmad is hardly the first to make the point, he argues persuasively through a series of essays that political, not military primacy is what makes or breaks a revolution. A revolution cannot win simply by launching straight into guerilla warfare with the state (as Che Guevara disastrously tried to do), he argues in a well-known essay called "Revolutionary Warfare: How to Tell When the Rebels Have Won". First, the enemy has to be morally isolated. The rebels must take away the enemy's legitimacy and transfer it to themselves through counterinstitutions that promise a more just society. The enemy must, in Ahmad's turn of phrase, be "outadministered before he is outfought", a theme he returns to in a previously unpublished essay on The Battle of Algiers.

A careful student of revolutionary movements, Ahmad was also a fierce critic of the authoritarian legacies of colonialism that 'indigenous' regimes not only failed to eliminate but actually adopted, often with even more brutality and corruption than their former colonizers. The institutions and political arrangements of colonialism, though often in masked or indirect form, persist after the colonizer has left - and, the more brutalized a society was (as in Algeria, which Ahmad studied more intensively than any other case) the more likely it is that only brutes and thugs will rise to the top of the political system. Using what's now a familiar neo-colonial argument, Ahmad suggests that the world system is structured in such a way, institutionally and informally, that authoritarian postcolonial regimes perform the same tasks that colonial ones used to do. "Postcolonial Systems of Power" and "The Neofascist State: Notes on the Pathology of Power in the Third World" are probably the clearest statements of these principles.

Written in an accessible, often acidly blunt style, the essays in this book are well suited to specialist and non-specialist alike. His method of breaking down the binaries and frameworks through which experts view the Third World (left/right, core/periphery, modern/traditional, etc) provides truly fresh insights into old problems. Through it, he comes to not just an understanding of the legacies of colonialism, the pathologies of power, but suggests possibilities for moving beyond them.