The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left

Raftopoulos, Brian

doi:10.1080/03057070600655988

Cited by 78 publications

(26 citation statements)

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“…This was reinforced by the foreign funding showered upon the MDC, which allowed Mugabe to lampoon the MDC as being in the pay of imperialists. Correspondingly, the implementation of the land reform programme effectively excluded the opposition from most rural areas, allowing ZANU-PF to consolidate its dominance outside the towns and cities (Raftopoulos 2006). In addition, professionals (especially teachers) in rural areas became targets of persecution by ZANU-PF, while within urban areas the middle classes came to be regarded with deep suspicion; this inhibited the commitment of many among their ranks to political activism.…”

Section: The Middle Class In Oppositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flight and fortitude: the decline of the middle class in Zimbabwe

Southall¹

2020

Africa

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This article focuses on the impact of the policies of the ruling Zimbabwe African National Union – Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) government on Zimbabwe's black middle class. It does so by exploring three propositions emerging from the academic literature. The first is that during the early years of independence, the middle class transformed into a party-aligned bourgeoisie. The second is that, to the extent that the middle class has not left the country as a result of the economic plunge from the 1990s, it played a formative role in opposition to ZANU-PF and the political elite. The third is that, in the face of ZANU-PF's authoritarianism and economic hardship, the middle class has largely withdrawn from the political arena.

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Section: The Middle Class In Oppositionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Flight and fortitude: the decline of the middle class in Zimbabwe

Southall¹

2020

Africa

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“…Raftopoulos (2005) says this has undermined the churches effectiveness as an agent for democratic change within an authoritarian state and also points to the churches failure to condemn the series of blanket amnesties granted by the state perpetrators of human rights vio-lations as another significant limitation to regime change.…”

Section: Political Providencementioning

confidence: 99%

“…This is proof that the ANC does not wish to see the ZANU PF government fall from grace and thus covertly supports ZANU PF and keeps it in power, such as it has done by promoting the power-sharing arrangement which in some circles is a strategy to resist regime change. Raftopoulos (2005) says that the decision by the South African presidency to push for a government of national unity in Zimbabwe was because it had serious doubts about the capacity of the MDC to form a national government and to gain the confidence of the armed forces. The resultant government of national unity is considered to be an obstacle to regime change in some circles.…”

Section: Sadc and Au's Role In Survival Of The Zanu Pf Regimementioning

confidence: 99%

Regime survival strategies in Zimbabwe in the 21st century

Moyo¹

2013

Afri. J. Pol. Sci. Int. Relat.

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Zimbabwe at the turn of the new millennium has received widespread condemnation particularly with the implementation of the controversial land reform programme. Such criticisms and attacks on the government threatened the existence of the regime; as such the regime employed various strategies to ensure its survival in an anarchical environment. The image portrayed abroad has been tattered as some of the survival strategies the regime used were followed by reports of violence, instability and abandonment of the rule of law, which created a serious challenge to modern developments on democracy and human rights. As a result Zimbabwe lost many friends especially from the West and /or West controlled institutions through either suspension from IMF and Commonwealth. From such a stand point this paper therefore seeks to analyse the Regime survival strategies in Zimbabwe in the 21st century.

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“…Research in this field by Brian Raftopoulos in particular (Raftopoulos 1995b;Raftopoulos and Phimister 1997;Raftopoulos and Yoshikuni 1999;Raftopoulos and Phimister 2000;Raftopoulos and Sachikonye 2001), 9 served as a springboard for what was to become over the course of the 1990s and beyond, a series of wide-ranging and thorough-going critiques of authoritarian nationalism (Raftopoulos 2003;Raftopoulos and Savage 2005). Infused with political and intellectual urgency, these interventions were themselves hotly debated as academics on the Left struggled to understand the dynamics driving the post-2000 crisis in terms of rights versus redistribution (Yeros 2002;Moore 2004;Raftopoulos 2006;Moyo and Yeros 2007), 10 a dispute which lost momentum once they were acknowledged as not necessarily mutually exclusive. They were anyway revised and taken up by a younger generation of scholars guided by Raftopoulos and Alois Mlambo, and published in 2009 as Becoming Zimbabwe (Raftopoulos and Mlambo 2009).…”

Section: Alternative Histories: Radical Historymentioning

confidence: 99%

Narratives of progress: Zimbabwean historiography and the end of history

Phimister

2012

Journal of Contemporary African Studies

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This brief commentary takes its inspiration from the opening address delivered by John Hoffman, and printed in these pages; that is, progress is usefully understood as a contradictory, contested and ambiguous process. But rather than attempt a comprehensive survey of the past 40 or so years of academic analyses of Zimbabwe's pasts, what follows has as its focus the emergence of 'patriotic history' and particularly its nationalist antecedents. These are critically examined. Although not concerned with the generality of recent studies that are neither nationalist nor materialist in orientation, this paper sketches in outline the rise, fall and rise of radical accounts. It ends by suggesting how such analyses might be taken forward.

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The Zimbabwean Crisis and the Challenges for the Left

Cited by 78 publications

References 0 publications

Flight and fortitude: the decline of the middle class in Zimbabwe

Flight and fortitude: the decline of the middle class in Zimbabwe

Regime survival strategies in Zimbabwe in the 21st century

Narratives of progress: Zimbabwean historiography and the end of history

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