Introduction In assessing the critical junctures in interactions between governance and development over the post-colonial period in Zimbabwe, this chapter addresses the conjunctural moments when alternative routes to political and economic development may have been pursued. Firstly, it provides a broad overview of the challenges between the inception of independence in 1980 and the fall of the iconic nationalist figure Robert Mugabe in 2017. Secondly, it undertakes a more in-depth analysis of the challenges and opportunities that followed the coup against Mugabe in 2017 and the aftermath of that event. In addressing the challenges around governance and development, the interaction of political dynamics at international, regional and national levels are examined in different historical periods in order to better understand both the limits of possibility at any given historical moment and the pressures for change. These pressures, as Raymond Williams articulated them, are not only those from emergent social forces and their ‘unrealised intentions and demands’, but also derive from ‘the formation and momentum of a given social mode: in effect the compulsion to act in ways that maintain and renew it’.1 Moreover, the periods of crisis that various societies undergo should also be viewed as opportunities for reconstruction in which the ‘destructive and the reconstructive moments are part of a single process of social transformation’.2 All states have their specific historic and national conditions of formation. As Stuart Hall, drawing on Gramscian theory, set out in his critique of Thatcherism, understanding the particularities of each state provides the basis for assessing the central aspects of state rule. These include the forms in which political
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forces are organised and represented, the ways in which the terrain of struggle is constituted, and understanding where the ‘strategic points of application are likely to arise’.3 In understanding the forms in which state and broader societal politics emerged in Zimbabwe, it is important to examine several aspects of the country’s state formation. First, as Dorman and several other analysts have pointed out, the power and stability of the Zimbabwe African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZanuPF) regime, or lack thereof, has drawn on three sources of power: material benefits or interests, coercive force and discursive strategies.4 This combination of political patronage and coercion has persistently moved towards an increasing reliance on the latter. Second, there has been a rapid erosion of state structures from powerful, centralised bureaucratic structures inherited from the settler colonial period, to state-party structures that took the form of increasingly militarised and ‘informalised’ forms of rule. This transition was characterised by a deliberate, but contested, de-professionalisation of the public service.5 Third, the structural changes in state institutions have created a complicated relationship between formality and informality in governance. Although formal state institutions have been weakened, it cannot be assumed that total disorder has followed. A good deal of recent studies of the Zimbabwean state have examined the different ways in which formal central state institutions have produced ‘informality’ and ‘disorder’ as the ‘expression of a permissive form of central statecraft’,6 at both the national and local government levels. This analysis connects with broader findings on the African continent showing that ‘formal institutions have not just co-existed with
Williams, 1977, p. 87 Hall, 1988, p. 104 p. 129 Dorman, 2016, p. 4; Raftopoulos & Mlambo, 2009; Moore, 2014 Alexander, 2013 McGregor & Chatiza, 2019
CASE STUDY: NAVIGATING TURBULENCE IN ZIMBABWE
