M. Anne Pitcher

The 'basket case' and the 'poster child': explaining the end of civil conflicts in Liberia and Mozambique

Through a comparison of protracted domestic conflicts in Liberia and Mozambique this paper evaluates several standard explanations regarding the roles of leaders, third parties and domestic social forces in resolving or continuing civil wars in Africa. The paper finds that no single account of how peace is achieved is sufficient to explain the continuance of violence in Liberia and the successful attainment of peace in Mozambique. Rather, an explanation that can accommodate the divergent outcomes of conflict in the two countries must combine insights from elite, structuralist and agency‐based approaches. Furthermore, the paper addresses the ways in which the construction of social organisations, particularly womens groups, during wartime affects the direction of donor funding and the shape of reconstruction efforts after the peace is signed. We illustrate our argument by examining the efforts of leaders, third parties and local actors, particularly women, to perpetuate violence or to bring about peace in Liberia and Mozambique, and the gendered contexts in which donor aid is distributed in the postwar period.

Recreating colonialism or reconstructing the state? Privatisation and politics in Mozambique

The privatisation process currently taking place in Mozambique raises important questions about state/capital relations. While supporters of the process argue that the state will become more efficient and the economy more productive, critics claim that privatisation is tantamount to recolonisation. To explore the new relationship being forged between state and capital, this article looks at the different operations of two joint venture cotton companies in the northern districts of Nampula and Cabo Delgado. It assesses the impact of capital formation on the states regulatory powers, policy‐making capacity, and legitimacy, and how local communities have reacted to the changes brought by private investment in cotton production. The article argues that privatisation constrains the governments capacity to shape the economy, but offers opportunities for it to seek legitimacy at the national and local level. Moreover, the diverse investment and production strategies pursued by the two private cotton companies ...

Disruption without transformation: agrarian relations and livelihoods in Nampula province, Mozambique 1975–1995

Since independence, three processes have shaped the lives of rural Mozambicans: the implementation of socialist policies, a protracted and low intensity civil war, and the more recent commitment to privatise state assets. This article examines their impact on agrarian economic relations and institutions of local political power in Nampula, northern Mozambique from 1975 to 1995. It describes and compares the ways that rural people constructed their livelihoods to cope with the effects of these processes. The article finds that socialism, war, and privatisation disrupted rather than transformed agrarian relations in Nampula. They reshaped rather than replaced local political authority and certain customary patterns, and they have unsettled rather than reconfigured the ways in which rural people make a living. Three reasons explain why disruption without transformation occurred. First, the outcomes of socialist policies and the war were inconclusive, and it appears that the effect of privatisation will be in...

African Socialisms and Postsocialisms

In the 1980s, historic political and economic shifts dealt a fatal blow to the foundational pillars of socialist systems worldwide. Unable to respond to the challenges from within and without to their attempted monopolization of economic and political power, socialist regimes succumbed to processes of structural adjustment, economic liberalization and political pluralism. Although scholars have focused in depth on the downfall of socialist and communist regimes in the former Soviet Union and in Eastern and Central Europe, the impact of these changes on socialist states in Africa was no less monumental. The 1989 collapse of communism in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 contributed to the demise of several avowedly Marxist-Leninist African states such as Ethiopia and CongoPR. Having lost key strategic allies and the primary referents of socialist success, they consequently underwent regime change. In addition, ruling parties in several countries such as Benin, Mozambique and Zambia jettisoned most of the rhetoric of socialism that had been employed in the 1970s and 1980s and began to speak instead of ‘emerging markets’, ‘efficiency’ and ‘democratic participation’. On the ground, the impact of the changes was much more variegated. In some places, even as companies changed from state to private hands, socialist ideology endured, persisting, for example, in Tanzania, whose populist version of socialism (termed Ujamaa, literally ‘familyhood’) defied easy classification by capitalists and communists alike. Just as ‘democracy’ today has become a common idiom of political parlance, so too might ‘socialism’ be considered for Africa an idiom of the 1950s to the 1980s. During that time, no fewer than thirty-five countries out of fifty-three proclaimed themselves ‘socialist’ at one or other point in their history. So widespread was the commitment to

Conflict and Cooperation: Gendered Roles and Responsibilities Within Cotton Households in Northern Mozambique

War, drought and the failure of centrally planned economic policies have resulted in a reorientation of government priorities in Mozambique. Since the late 1980s, agricultural policy regarding food and cash crop production has shifted away from a dependence on state farms towards a reliance on commercial enterprises and the family sector. The government also has applied market principles to the purchase and processing of cash crops and allowed private companies to replace inefficient and poorly managed state enterprises. These decisions have not been adopted hastily; they have been accompanied by numerous studies that try to anticipate the possible impact of these changes at the micro and macro economic level. Several of these studies are noteworthy in their attention to the position of rural women in Mozambique. They acknowledge the significant role played by women and they detail the numerous productive activities that rural women engage in, from planting and weeding to childcare and collecting firewood (Liberman 1988,1989,1992; Casimiro, Laforte, and Pessoa 1991; Andrade, Cardoso, Casimiro, and Louro 1992; UEM 1993). In light of the tremendous economic changes that the country is undertaking, many of the studies warn the government against policies that will marginalize women and urge officials to incorporate a gender component into projects and policies (Casimiro, Laforte, and Pessoa 1991; Liberman 1992).

Politics in the Portuguese Empire : the State, industry, and cotton, 1926-1974

The creation of the Estado Novo, 1926-1936 the nature of the Portuguese textile industry the establishment of the cotton-growing regime intervention and industrialization - the Estado Novo, 1936-1946 the textile industry at war - new market, old machinery the intensification of the cotton campaign pretensions of democracy and development, 1946-1958 post-war crisis in the textile industry colonial cotton in transition the decline of the authoritarian regime, 1958-1974 a divided industry the collapse of Portuguese colonialism.

Sowing the Seeds of Failure: Early Portuguese Cotton Cultivation in Angola and Mozambique, 1820-1926*

Prior to the advent of the Estado Novo, early attempts by the Portuguese to grow cotton in Angola and Mozambique were humiliating failures. Natural factors contributed to the poor record of cotton production from the 1860s to the 1920s, but erratic international prices, conflicting and contradictory metropolitan objectives in the colonies, inappropriate methods of production, competing crop and labour demands, and African resistance also led to the failure of any sustained and appreciable cotton cultivation in Angola and Mozambique. This article details the history of early attempts and illuminates those forces which ultimately shaped the Estado Novos own policy.

What Has Happened to Organized Labor in Southern Africa

Why have labor movements in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa increasingly been marginalized from the economic debates that are taking place in their countries, even though they have supported ruling parties? Policy reforms such as trade liberalization, privatization, and revisions to labor legislation in all three countries partially account for the loss of power by organized labor as many scholars have claimed. Yet, these policy “adjustments” have also interacted with long-run, structural changes in production, distribution, and trade of goods as well as with processes of democratization to undermine the position of trade unions across much of southern Africa. The article explores this puzzle by first examining the different historical trajectories of organized labor in Mozambique, Zambia, and South Africa. It then analyzes how policy reforms, global restructuring, and democracy had similar consequences across all three cases; collectively, they produced declines in trade-union membership and weakened the influence of organized labor. Although trade unions face a number of daunting challenges, the conclusion traces emerging opportunities for labor to recover from its current malaise.

Ordering power? The politics of state-led housing delivery under authoritarianism – the case of Luanda, Angola:

The urban studies literature has extensively analysed the modernist, developmental or neoliberal drivers of urban restructuring in the global South, but has largely overlooked the ways in which governments, particularly those with authoritarian characteristics, try to reinforce their legitimacy and assert their political authority through the creation of satellite cities and housing developments. From Ethiopia to Singapore, authoritarian regimes have recently provided housing to the middle class and the poor, not only to alleviate housing shortages, or bolster a burgeoning real estate market, but also to ‘order power’ and buy the loyalty of residents. To evaluate the extent to which authoritarian regimes realise their political objectives through housing provision, we survey nearly 300 poor and middle class respondents from three new housing projects in Luanda, Angola. Alongside increasing social and spatial differentiation brought about by state policies, we document unintended beneficiaries of state housing and uneven levels of citizen satisfaction. We explain that internal state contradictions, individual agency and market forces have acted together to re-shape the government’s efforts to order power.

Contingent technocracy: bureaucratic independence in developing countries

This study investigates the effects of formal bureaucratic independence under varying democratic conditions. Conventional accounts predict that greater formal independence of technocratic agencies facilitates policy implementation, but those claims rest on observations of industrialised, high-income countries that are also established democracies. On the basis of research in developing countries, we argue that the effects of agency independence depend on the political context in which the agency operates. Our empirical subjects are privatisation agencies and their efforts to privatise state-owned enterprises in Africa. We predict that greater independence leads to more thorough privatisation under authoritarian regimes, but that the effect of independence declines as a country becomes more democratic. Using an original data set, we examine the relationship between formal agency independence and privatisation in Africa from 1990 to 2007. Our results modify the conventional wisdom on bureaucratic independence and culminate in a more nuanced theory of “contingent technocracy”.