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Zimbabwe Sovereignty Index (Burke Index), 2024-2025
13.10.2025 08:57
indexSovereignty, Democracy & Zimbabwe's Tragedy
10.09.2025 08:42
researchThe Zimbabwean nation-state project: A historical diagnosis of identity and power-based conflicts in a postcolonial stateThis Discussion Paper provides an insightful, historically-rooted analysis of the crisis of the nation-state project in Africa, based on a case study of Zimbabwe. In this regard, it addresses issues related to the evolution of the Zimbabwe national project against the background of resistance to settler colonialism; the contradictions that attended the nationalist struggle, particularly the divisions along the lines of race and the less-focused issues of ethnicity, personality and ideological difference; and the postcolonial challenges to the nation-state project. These latter include the project’s betrayal by some of its heroes; its undermining by the increased power of international institutions and forces of globalisation in a post-Cold war world; economic crises; and generational changes. The paper posits that the nation-state project on the continent is very much a work-in-progress and is faced with many challenges.
In the name of sovereignty: Displacement and state making in post-independence ZimbabweThis article argues that state-induced displacements are not aberrations, but rather an ever-present possibility and practice integral to contemporary as well as past modes of rule and state making. States and their allies make discursive use of notions of sovereignty to legitimise violence and displacement against selective citizens in the service of different projects at multiple scales. Such practices are themselves a means of producing and performing sovereignty, in Agamben’s (1998) terms. Three cases from post-independence Zimbabwe are used to provide some evidence and insight into more general patterns linking displacement, sovereignty and state making. At the same time, they confirm the historical and spatial diversity of particular assertions and versions of sovereignty, as reflected in situated expressions and effects of state making.
