Paul Bjerk’s Building a Peaceful Nation: Julius Nyerere and the Establishment of Sovereignty in Tanzania, 1960–1964 offers an illuminating contribution to the historiography of decolonization and postcolonial state formation—one that adds empirical depth and, to some extent, conceptual breadth to this growing body of scholarship. Bjerk’s monograph aims to tell the story of the early years of Tanzania’s existence from an Africanist’s perspective, while remaining attentive to the broader global context. He draws on an impressive array of archival and oral sources and employs a variety of analytical modes to explore different dimensions of Tanzanian nation-building between 1960 and 1964. The book’s ten chapters are divided into three parts. Part I, “Searching for a Sovereign Discourse,” begins by examining the early personal and intellectual biography of Julius Nyerere, Tanzania’s first president, following Nyerere from his village home to his graduate studies in Edinburgh to his assumption of the leadership of the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU) in 1950s Dar es Salaam. The section then reflects on the changing political meanings of ethnicity, race, and anticipated national citizenship in the lead-up to mainland Tanganyika’s 1961 independence from British rule, as TANU contested its opponents’ narrow identity politics in favor of an inclusive vision of national identity. Part II, “Internal Sovereignty,” begins at the moment of Tanganyikan independence, situating this event in a regional context full of tensions and threats to the new East African country’s domestic unity and geopolitical integrity. Bjerk then investigates the genesis of Nyerere’s hallmark project of African Socialism, ujamaa, as a practical response to some of these international, regional, and local challenges, considering the possible precolonial roots of ujamaa thought and the external models that shaped the country’s emerging program of socialist villagization. Part II then delves into a consequential moment of national danger during a 1964 army mutiny, which resulted in the formation of a national youth service program dedicated to developmental and paramilitary activities and designed to restore and secure the national government’s—and, more specifically, TANU’s—domestic monopoly on political power and military force. Part III, “External Sovereignty,” extends a previous concern with Cold War diplomacy and late anticolonial struggles in southern Africa to an analysis of Tanganyika’s early postcolonial foreign relations and the consolidation of the United Republic of Tanzania in 1964. This section begins with an overview of this era’s foreign policy anxieties and approaches, and then proceeds to more in-depth scrutiny of the eventually discarded project of East African Federation and the conversely successful union between Tanganyika and the adjacent island territory of Zanzibar. It concludes by surveying the TANU leadership’s strategies for navigating a volatile geopolitical landscape of real and perceived Cold War intrigue, alliances, and hostilities.