Born powerful? Post-Liberation Politics in Eritrea and Zimbabwe

Abstract

The paper is a comparative analysis of post-liberation politics in Zimbabwe and Eritrea. It proposes that insufficient attention has been paid to the impact of negotiated transitions and inherited state forms in analysing Southern African post-liberation states. The Eritrean case, which is relatively little-known, reveals the significance of the negotiated transitions and the inherited state institutions (or the lack thereof), in addition to the history and weight of the armed struggle and nationalist politics. While there are many similarities between the two states, both during the liberation war and after, relations between state and society have been markedly different.