Power Politics In Zimbabwe

Tracing the country's elusive search for political stability across the decades, Michael Bratton offers a careful analysis of the failed power-sharing experiment, an account of its institutional origins, and an explanation of its demise. In the process, he explores key challenges of political transition: constitution making, elections, security-sector reform, and transitional justice."--Publishers website

Zimbabwe¿s July 2013 election brought the country¿s ¿inclusive¿ power-sharing interlude to an end and installed Mugabe and ZANU-PF for yet another¿its seventh¿term. Why? What explains the resilience of authoritarian rule in Zimbabwe? Tracing the country¿s elusive search for political stability across the decades, Michael Bratton offers a careful analysis of the failed power-sharing experiment, an account of its institutional origins, and an explanation of its demise. In the process, he explores key challenges of political transition: constitution making, elections, security-sector reform, and transitional justice.

What is distinctive about this book is its interdisciplinary approach towards deciphering the complex meanings of President Gabriel Mugabe of Zimbabwe making it possible to evaluate Mugabe from a historical, political, philosophical, gender, literal and decolonial perspectives. It is concerned with capturing various meanings of Mugabeism.

The diamond fields of Chiadzwa, among the worlds largest sources of rough diamonds have been at the centre of struggles for power in Zimbabwe since their discovery in 2006. Against the backdrop of a turbulent political economy, control of Chiadzwas diamonds was hotly contested. By 2007 a new case of blood diamonds had emerged, in which the countrys security forces engaged with informal miners and black market dealers in the exploitation of rough diamonds, violently disrupting local communities and looting a key national resource. The formalisation of diamond mining in 2010 introduced new forms of large-scale theft, displacement and rights abuses. Facets of Power is the first comprehensive account of the emergence, meaning and profound impact of Chiadzwas diamonds. Drawing on new fieldwork and published sources, the contributors present a graphic and accessibly written narrative of corruption and greed, as well as resistance by those who have suffered at the hands of the minerals secretive and violent beneficiaries. If the lessons of resistance have been mostly disheartening ones, they also point towards more effective strategies for managing public resources, and mounting democratic challenges to elites whose power is sustained by preying on them.

This book examines the role of the law in the constitution and contestation of state power in Zimbabwean history. It is for researchers interested in the history of the state in Southern Africa, as well as those interested in African legal history.

Focusing on political trials in Zimbabwe's Magistrates' Courts between 2000 and 2012, Susanne Verheul explores why the judiciary have remained a central site of contestation in post-independence Zimbabwe. Drawing on rich court observations and in-depth interviews, this book foregrounds law's potential to reproduce or transform social and political power through the narrative, material, and sensory dimensions of courtroom performances. Instead of viewing appeals to law as acts of resistance by marginalised orders for inclusion in dominant modes of rule, Susanne Verheul argues that it was not recognition by but of this formal, rule-bound ordering, and the form of citizenship it stood for, that was at stake in performative legal engagements. In this manner, law was much more than a mere instrument. Law was a site in which competing conceptions of political authority were given expression, and in which people's understandings of themselves as citizens were formed and performed.

What is distinctive about this book is its interdisciplinary approach towards deciphering the complex meanings of President Gabriel Mugabe of Zimbabwe making it possible to evaluate Mugabe from a historical, political, philosophical, gender, literal and decolonial perspectives. It is concerned with capturing various meanings of Mugabeism.

Political transition and democratisation challenges have been noted in African countries including Angola, Burkina Faso, Kenya, Mali, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, resulting in the African Union (AU) intervening on behalf of citizens, using tried-and-tested mechanisms of imposing a power-sharing agreement to preside over a transitional period, during which there are key changes to the constitution and the political conduct of the incumbency, and partisan institutions are weaned from seeking to perpetuate the status quo. This book focuses on Zimbabwe's military and its perceived veto power in the transition to democratisation from 2008 until 2013. The objective was to analyse, monitor and comment on the unique democratic transformational challenges faced by Zimbabwe's Government of National Unity. One of the book's key findings is that every time partisan forces carry out an operation in the name of a political party, there is a direct correlation in which the same loses its national character. This is the context of the challenge facing Zimbabwean forces when used for partisan gain and why the Southern African Development Community (SADC), in its last communique in Maputo on 15 June 2013, sought to compel a written undertaking from the generals that they would desist from playing a direct role in the politics of the country. The AU had earlier expressed its deep regret when faced with the results of serious human rights abuses that were committed with impunity.