The Radicalised State: Zimbabwe's Interrupted Revolution

Abstract

This article conceptualises the revolutionary situation that gripped Zimbabwe from the late 1990s. That was the moment in which the two political questions that historically have galvanized peripheral capitalism – the agrarian and the national – were returned to the forefront of political life. We argue that the revolutionary situation resulted neither in a revolution, nor in mediocre reformism, nor in restoration. It resulted in an interrupted revolution, marked by a radical agrarian reform and a radicalised state – the first on the continent since the end of the Cold War.

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Notes on contributors

Sam Moyo

Paris Yeros , in Adjunct Professor of International Relations at the Catholic University of Minas Gerais, Belo Horizonte, Brazil, and Research Fellow of AIAS. He is former co-editor of the London-based journals Millennium and Historical Materialism, and is currently completing a book on the Zimbabwe Question; e-mail: [email protected].

Paris Yeros

Sam Moyo is Executive Director of the African Institute for Agrarian Studies (AIAS), Harare, Zimbabwe. He has published extensively on land, agrarian and environmental issues in Zimbabwe, Southern Africa and beyond. He served as Associate Professor of Agrarian Studies at the University of Zimbabwe until 2000, and as director on various boards of research networks and institutes in Africa; e-mail: [email protected].