David Moore

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.

... as opposed to social science) concerns attention to European ideas that link Africa with disease (2000, 134–6). Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Joseph ... that he give them a huge pension settlement and that he rectify the long-simmering land question (see Kinsey 1998; Moyo 2000 ...

After an attempt at a theoretical and contextual introduction to Mugabe’s Legacy, I dug into the main menu with something akin to the mainstay of Joost Fontein’s nearly simultaneously published book on the politics of death in Zimbabwe: a death. I am sure Joostwould agree that such a denouement hardly means ‘the end’. My end-that-is-a-new-beginning entailed the somewhat magical way I discovered that Robert Mugabe had indeed reached the final point of his mortal coil, and my recounting of Stephen Groote’s hastily rallied Zimbabwean éminence activistes grises’ epitaphs on SAFM’s Sunrise. Surprisingly (to me), none of them mentioned in other than laudatory mode Mugabe’s learning many of his trade’s tricks during Zimbabwe’s liberation war. I tried to remedy some of such lacunae at the end of the interviews on that September 6, 2019 morning, but when writing the book discovered writer Percy Zvomuya’s historical delving reflected my interests. Zvomuya zeroed in on the mid-1970s moment Mug...

Contrary to many claims, the World Bank's 1997 Development Report The State in a Changing World is no radical departure from neo‐liberal development principles. Rather, it marks the culmination of the Bank's gradual move away from crude anti‐statism to its ‘good governance’ discursive efforts to ‘get the state right’ in its quest for a solution to the post‐1970s development crisis. This article examines The State in a Changing World from within the Bank's discourse on the role of the state and its managers, and current academic discussions of the ‘third world’ state and globalisation. It is difficult for these realms of discourse to construct a hegemonic vision of ‘development’ in the current conjuncture — particularly while the Bank remains hostage to private capital markets. Perspectives on the role of the state with deeper than Hayekian neo‐liberal roots must go beyond the contradictory melange of anti‐statism and managerialism which make up the current discourse of ‘neo‐statism’. However, such alterat...

... Sithole, M. and Makumbe, J. 1997. Elections in Zimbabwe: The ZANU (PF) hegemony and its incipient decline. African Journal of Political Science , 2(1): 122–39. ... [CrossRef] View all references; cf. Howard-Hassmann 20107. Howard-Hassmann, R. 2010. ...

Marx’s much uttered epigram about men making history but not in the conditions they choose can either be a fetter to progressive political and economic action or a corrective to false steps in the direction of futile and faulty utopias. Materialist historians are thus among the best equipped of social scientists for the task of discerning what can be done at a certain time for a certain project, not only what must be done from the point of view of social justice. Their history can provide part of the answer – the conditioning preliminary – to Lenin’s question: “what is to be done?” When they transcend their disciplinary borders into political economy, and become students or even practitioners of “development”, they move into the normative side of Marx’s quest to go beyond historical structure into contemporary agency. Few historians take this step. When they do, their work becomes part of much more than a record of history. It influences its making. Their understanding becomes part of history’s changes, even if they declare disinterest.

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.’