Lionel Cliffe

Complex political emergencies and the state: Failure and the fate of the state

It is argued that an understanding of the role and nature of the state and of processes of state collapse are vital for understanding Complex Political Emergencies for various practical reasons and for drawing general lessons from particular experiences: CPEs are often rooted in prior state collapse; humanitarian assistance may have to contend with a fractured, ineffective or nonexistent state; part of post-conflict recovery will involve reconstituting the state. Such lessons can only be generalised where there is some degree of shared context and experience. As a tool for facilitating comparisons of like with like and for understanding the inter-relatedness of several factors, a typology of situations is drawn up on the basis of the state and its dynamics and of the origins, forms and trajectory of the CPE and of interventions into it.

Land reform in South Africa.

The newly‐elected South African government began in 1994 to make laws and implement a programme for land reform. It consisted of three dimensions: redistribution (transferring white‐owned commercial farm land to African users); restitution (settling claims for land lost under apartheid measures by restoration of holdings or compensation); and land tenure reform (to provide more secure access to land in the former bantustans). Only a few restitution claims have been so far resolved. After much rethinking a revised draft of a land tenure bill is to be presented to Parliament in late 2000, but as one stated aim is to give ‘land to tribes’, it remains to be seen whether it will bring increased democratisation, allowing for common resource management, or will entrench ‘decentralised despotism’. This article concentrates on the most actively pursued dimension of land reform: redistribution. Under the diverse influences of rights‐based activism of earlier years and of World Bank advice about a ‘market‐led’ approach, the government has set up mechanisms to help finance and facilitate ‘community’ initiatives to acquire land, to settle on it and, if possible, to make productive use of it. What was advocated as a more rapid and less bureaucratic approach than a government agency acquiring and administering resettlement has instead spawned a sprawling edifice, some of it out‐sourced to an array of consultants, often with little experience and few credentials, and has led to a protracted process of transfer of a much smaller amount of land in five years than, say, Zimbabwe managed in the same period. The reasons for this are examined. A policy rethink during 1999 has led to changes in emphasis which, hopefully, will speed up the redistribution of land, provide more back‐up to those resettled, and prioritise future grants for more productive agricultural use. This latter formula, however, is constricted by old‐fashioned ‘modernist’ (and often implicitly colonial) orthodoxies still current in South Africa, not least in the ANC and government. These are fixated on ‘commercialisation’ ‐ which usually translates into larger‐scale and high‐tech ‐ and the promotion of the interests of a would‐be black agrarian entrepreneurial class, rather than those of the propertyless. Some hope may derive from the inclusion of experiments in the new programme to chart an alternative to the ‘market‐led’ formula which would instead allow redistribution of land as an element within district‐level planning.

Labour migration and peasant differentiation: Zambian experiences

Peasants in Zambia, as elsewhere in Southern Africa, were drawn into the world economy as labour migrants, and even now, when urban employment is more permanent, the rural areas are given over more to the reproduction of labour than to the production of commodities. The resulting general impoverishment has not, however, precluded significant differentiation among the various regional peasantries. Moreover, in these peasantries, where many men are absent, resulting changes in property rights related to kinship and in the division of labour between sexes mean that the position of women within the pattern of class formation must be specially examined. Differentiation and the special position of women have to be taken into account in assessing the political potential in societies whose complexity gives special meaning to the ‘worker‐peasant alliance’.

An overview of Fast Track Land Reform in Zimbabwe: editorial introduction

Events in the last decade around the land question in Zimbabwe and the broader political context in which they have played out have been dramatic and transformational. Sparked by land occupations (locally referred to as jambanja meaning ‘violence’ or ‘angry argument’), and involving contested land expropriation and violent episodes, the process has not surprisingly proved contentious among policy-makers and commentators, nationally and internationally, and among all those who have sought to explain, justify or criticise it. With few exceptions, those who have engaged in writing or political rhetoric have tended to take positions on one or other end of the spectrum in what has been a highly polarised debate, between welcoming a reversal of a racial distribution of land – some of them bewailing the manner of implementation and its distorting of the state – and those who condemn the end, in principle, as well as the means. The fervour surrounding these dramatic events and their explanation was vastly heightened, as well as being framed by, a massively debilitating economic crisis. This was marked by a world record hyperinflation, for the moment resolved, and by a vast shrinkage in GDP. Debate continues as to what extent the overall economic meltdown was caused by or generated declines in post-land reform production or whether and how these processes interacted (see Davies 2005; Mamdani 2008; Scoones et al. 2010; UNDP 2008 for different positions in this debate). The political context was no less dramatic and transformational. A nationalist party, Zimbabwe African National UnionPatriotic Front (ZANU-PF ), dominant for 20 years was seriously challenged for the first time by a new party, the Movement for Democratic Change (MDC), and reacted with a string of repressive laws and actions. These events also arguably shaped and were shaped by the land reform; one view explored below (Alexander 2006) is that repressive mechanisms were a requirement of enacting FTLRTP. The very intensity of the debates and the widespread international interest in these events make a strong case for more careful and detailed analysis of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme (FTLRP) without preconceived conclusions. The passage of eleven years since the FTLRP began to be implemented is another trenchant reason to review these processes. The emergence of a range of studies into what has transpired over a lengthy period provides a ‘reality check’ and an opportunity to extend debates beyond policy prescriptions and their initial implementation to an assessment of what has actually been happening on the ground as a result of the land redistribution that occurred in the early 2000s. The present collection, while rehearsing past events and identifying the social and The Journal of Peasant Studies Vol. 38, No. 5, December 2011, 907–938

Zimbabwe's Agricultural 'Success' and Food Security in Southern Africa

Zimbabwes track record is being touted as the latest ‘miracle’ that should be copied in promoting agricultural production. It has indeed succeeded in producing food surpluses in most years and its African smallholders have greatly increased their contribution to marketed crop production since 1980. This article seeks to explore how far it can be the basis for a ‘model’ for agricultural development, at least for the ‘labour‐reserve economies’ of southern Africa (including even a reformed South Africa). In order to do that it first explores the basis for such success as has occurred but also spells out the limits of these ‘successes’, what areas of necessary agrarian transformation have not yet been addressed and how these might be tackled. It will be shown that smallholders in the former ‘reserves’ have responded to removal of settler colonialisms imposed barriers and to the extension to them of new opportunities of credit and inputs and of centralised (not as the World Bank would prefer ‘free’ marketing...

Rural Class Formation and Ecological Collapse in Botswana

After some early colonial impetus towards commodity production, Botswana was cast in the role of a stagnant labour supply economy from which it has been only partially rescued by the expansion of cattle exports and mining in the post‐Independence area. This form of capitalist development has been built upon and in turn shaped by the class structure of the pre‐colonial Tswana states. The particular and interrelated consequences for rural Botswana that are explored in this article are 1) a pattern of class formation in which a substantial class of large ranchers have gained dramatically, and some rich peasant agriculturalists significantly, which has emerged largely from a former ruling class and its vassals and clients at the expense of former serfs and commoners, who are becoming an impoverished and partially proletarianized caste of poor peasants; 2) a worsening of the position of women in peasant households, as a result of migrant labour, an increased burden of labour and of responsibility for all aspec...

Capitalism or feudalism? the famine in Ethiopia

The famine in Ethiopia, as in the Sahel, is not simply a ‘natural’ disaster but has social and economic origins. Moreover, the suffering is not simply the compounding of the effects of food shortage by the harsh burdens borne by tenant formers. While southern Ethiopia, where famine is now beginning to strike, had a feudal land system imposed in the 19th Century, the northern provinces where the famine first hit has a system where there were lords of the land but no landlords and peasants had the security of access to land even though they paid ‘tithes’. The commercialisation and mechanisation of agriculture in the last generation has eroded those rights. Landlords are becoming capitalist farmers and a landless class is growing. The famine is accelerating these processes, just as it is exacerbated by them.

Conflict and Peace in the Horn of Africa

ROAPE has commissioned several special issues on the Horn of Africa in the last 25 years. The first in 1984 (No. 30), ‘Conflict in the Horn of Africa’, started off by characterising the hallmark of the region as ‘manifold, violent social conflict . . .’ Although by 1996 (No. 70), ‘The Horn of Africa’ looked forward hopefully to peace dividends emanating from the successful end to liberation wars within the region, and from the end of the Cold War which had been fuelling conflicts in this part of Africa, new conflicts within Somalia had already ruptured the state there. By 2003, the ‘Horn of Conflict’ (No. 97) emphasised the centrality of violence to the region’s political economy.

Editorial: the prospects for Zimbabwe

Editorial Staff Doris Burgess Judith Mohan Overseas Editors Cairo: Shahida El Baz Copenhagen: Roger Leys Kampala: Mahmood Mamdani Maputo: Ruth First Stockholm: Bhagavan Toronto: Jonathan Barker, John Saul Washington: Meredeth Turshen Zaria: Bjorn Beckman Contributing Editors Basil Davidson Sam Geza Thomas Hodgkin Charles Kallu-Kalumiya Mustafa Khogali Colin Leys Robert Van Lierop Archie Mafeje Prexy Nesbitt Claude Meillassoux Ken Post

Outcomes of post-2000 fast track land reform in Zimbabwe

This volume will be an essential starting place for analysts, policy-makers, historians and activists seeking to understand what has happened with regards to the struggle over land in Zimbabwe since 2000 and to spotlight the key issues for the next decade. The struggle over land has been the central issue in Zimbabwe ever since white settlers began to carve out large farms over a century ago. Their monopolisation of the better-watered half of the land was the focus of the African war of liberation war, and was partially modified following Independence