Explaining Political and Social Change in Post-Liberation Southern Africa

Salih O. Noor, The University of Chicago

Five “post-liberation” Southern African countries—Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe—gained freedom from settler-colonial domination through violent, mass-mobilizing “liberation struggles.” However, the legacies of these struggles for more inclusive, equitable, nonracialist nations are characterized today by sharply differing political regimes, structural inequalities, and social cleavages. Existing case studies often emphasize deterministic structures of the settler-colonial era or political factors of the conflict period. This study adopts an innovative critical juncture framework to provide a comprehensive comparative-historical explanation for all five countries. It identifies the liberation reform period, when revolutionary actors assumed state power and implemented different reforms, as a critical juncture shaping the countries’ path-dependent trajectories of political development. The analysis highlights the influence of late-twentieth-century changes in the international state and economic systems on national revolutions and their legacies. Additionally, it introduced analytical tools and propositions for applying critical junctures to examining the long-term effects of revolutions, national conflicts, and social movements. It highlights that radical, liberal, and conservative changes during moments of major institutional change provoke distinctive “reactive sequences” that profoundly shape subsequent political developments.

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 Presented in Session 2. Macro-Historical Dynamics