Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad

Why have African countries that decolonized through liberation struggles been characterized by markedly different political institutions and patterns of social inclusion? This project seeks to understand the political legacies of liberation in Angola, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, South Africa, Namibia, and Eritrea. These countries decolonized through radical national-social revolutions in the second half of the twentieth century, between the demise of Portuguese empire (1975) and the fall of apartheid in South Africa (1994). Most sociologists, political scientists, and historians agree that the national liberation movements (NLMs) that led the violent, ideologically-driven, and mass-mobilizing struggles against colonial and whiter-settler rule, have shaped post-liberation state and society in profound ways compared to their non-revolutionary nationalist counterparts in the remainder of the continent in the 1950 and 1960s, whose influence was minimal and diminished quickly. Liberation and its legacies thus continue to inspire debate. Most social scientists nonetheless assume that (1) the revolutionary struggles culminated in radical changes with enduring instability, and (2) their political legacies are invariably hegemonic and inherently antithetical to liberal democracy. However, I observe that the aftermath of the revolutionary struggles was characterized by both radical and reformist approaches to state and nation-building, and consequently by significant cross-national variations in state institutions, political contestation, and social conflict. My preliminary findings indicate that markedly different political systems with different institutional configurations and modes of change emerged in the aftermath of the revolutionary struggles: socialist dictatorships (Mozambique and Angola), developmental authoritarianism (Eritrea), promarket electoral democracies (Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Namibia). Further, these postliberation political paths are li