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O trabalho Cadernos de Estudos Africanos está licenciado com uma Licença Creative Commons-Atribuição-NãoComercial-CompartilhaIgual 4.0 Internacional.

Can voter emigration sustain hegemonic undemocratic regimes at a time when elections and democratization are on the rise around the globe? In this chapter I show a link between the mobility of young, middle class, educated urbanites and the survival of ruling parties faced with growing international and local pressures. In additional to benefiting from traditional methods of centralizing power incumbent regimes can sustain their rule when opposition supporters are forced to emigrate because of deteriorating economic or political conditions. My findings suggest that the exit of voters both weakened the opposition movement and relieved political pressures on the incumbent party.

This essay is a feminist response to the 2017 coup in Zimbabwe that brought to an end Robert Mugabe’s thirty-seven-year on power. Mugabe came into power in 1980 after his party, the Zimbabwe African National Union–Patriotic Front (ZANU PF), successfully negotiated for an end to the civil war. The male-dominated ZANU PF has stayed in power because they consolidated power around Mugabe’s leadership. However, as the aging Mugabe became frail and his fifty-two-year-old energetic wife found her political voice, ZANU PF became deeply fractured and was facing electoral defeat in the 2018 elections. Grace Mugabe’s rise to power became the rallying point for ZANU PF to evict their longtime leader. Her fall from power has been used to restrict the voices of women even in this new era of political openness.

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