Introduction: Politics, Patronage and Violence in Zimbabwe

Abstract

This special issue is about politics, patronage and violence in Zimbabwe.These themes provide a means of exploring Zimbabwe's dramatic upheavals in the light of broader debates in African studies over the character of the postcolonial state, the cultural politics of opposition and the role of patronage economies.The articles collected here do more than simply examine these issues at a key juncture in Zimbabwe's history.They also provide a riposte to some conventional Africanist views and open up new avenues of inquiry.Zimbabwe's recent history provides a novel take on these themes, as the country's 'crisis' provoked scholars to engage in new ways with debates previously deemed almost irrelevant.While clearly the 'crisis' is rooted in long-standing tendencies, Zimbabwe's powerful state bureaucracies, its liberation struggle history, its substantial formal sector and its strong postindependence history of service provision had all seemed to mark it out as different from, if not an 'exception' to, the experience of those African countries in West and Central Africa that had often provided the empirical basis for theories of state 'failure' and social and political disorder.There seemed little point in engaging with debates that assumed that African states were 'weak', or with ideas about neo-patrimonial rule that hinged on the legitimacy of tradition or family, leaving no space for the narrative and ideological weight of liberation struggle legacies or the inheritance of centralised bureaucratic states.Other themes also lacked resonance.Corruption, for example, although present in Zimbabwe as everywhere else, had not been a defining feature of governance up to the late 1990s, and where it had come to light it had caused scandal and outrage.Debates over civic activism and the labour movement invited comparison with other southern Africa nations, given their longstanding shared histories of mobilisation, and the institutional and personal connections within nationalist and labour as well as religious movements that spanned regional borders.But the decade of change that culminated in the political violence of 2008, hyperinflation, deindustrialisation, collapsing services and mass impoverishment have prompted scholars to engage in new ways with wider debates in African studies over the transformation of state institutions, the consequences of patronage, informality and elite accumulation, and the political and social effects of truncated horizons for youth.The context for the research for the articles in this issue was the window of relative stability provided by Zimbabwe's regionally negotiated Global Political Agreement (GPA) and subsequent establishment of the 'Inclusive