Suchergebnisse

Violence – ranging from barely detectable to genocidal to coups and post-coup mêlées – has marred most if not all of Zimbabwe's elections since its 1980 birth. Electoral brutality has been almost normalised since Zimbabwe's first meaningful opposition, coupled with the 'fast track' land reform-inspired crises, accompanied the millennium's turn. This article suggests that elections are signposts of what Antonio Gramsci might have considered the balance of coercion and consent during the long interregna between colonialism and an uncertain end. Evidence from Zimbabwe's 2023 election and its predecessors illustrates the changing techniques between the coercion/consent poles as ZANU-PF's leaders gain and maintain power along the rocky road to an unknown destination.

The startlingly definitive election victory for Zimbabwe's Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) at the end of July 2013 incorporated elements ranging from coercion, cheating, and regional connivance (with opposition's hapless performance) so seamlessly that many scholars and political practitioners have prophesised the near death of democracy there and elsewhere on the continent. This article reviews the process of and the discourse on the election. Historical reflections based on recent archival research offer comparative perspectives. Democratic progress in Zimbabwe must be reassessed soberly and without illusions.

ABSTRACT
Lionel Cliffe's idea of 'generations' was a way of understanding the structure/agency divide and internecine struggles among Zimbabwe's nascent ruling classes during its liberation struggle. Here, its utility as an analytical tool on factional conflict is assessed. Cliffe's own involvement in the Zimbabwe African National Union's history is also examined as a lens on its generational and ideological contradictions. Further, archival evidence of the British state's observations of Mugabe illustrates how he fused the contradictions of age cohorts, points of entry into the struggle, political philosophy and international dimensions, and suggests, too, the difficulties of outsiders' understanding of complex struggles.

Thinking about war and its aftermath through the lenses of some classical political economy and political 'science' may cast fresh light on the protracted relationship of war and development. Karl Marx's idea of primitive accumulation warns us that 'becoming capitalist' is inherently violent. Max Weber's notion of states' monopoly over force is worth contemplation even as these organisations simultaneously emerge and fade away. Antonio Gramsci helps us grapple with the dialectic of coercion and consent whilst these processes unfold amidst universal desires for deepening democracy – while its dreams fade into nightmares in a new conjuncture of fear. This paper, prepared for Colombo's Centre for Policy Analysis and the Secure Livelihoods Research Consortium's conference 'Challenges of Post-War Development in Asia and Africa' of 1 to 3 September 2014, also takes brief forays into some southern African empirical referents to these formulations to further illustrate their complexities and the complications of implementing productive peace in the interstices of the drawn out crises of capitalism's initial stages in the 'third world.'