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Zimbabwe's Unfinished Business

Rethinking Land, State and Nation in the Context of Crisis

edited by Amanda Hammar, Brian Raftopoulos, Stig Jensen

How is ‘the land question’ in Zimbabwe being reconstituted by the current political and economic crisis, and what does this mean for rethinking the state and redefining the contours of citizenship and nation in postcolonial Zimbabwe?

What do heightened assertions of sovereignty, increasingly violent modes of rule, deepening forms of authoritarian nationalism, and the narrowing of spaces of citizenship, reveal about the changing politics of land?

In the current context of crisis, new alliances and animosities are emerging that simultaneously disrupt old essentialisms and construct new ones. Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business aims to deconstruct and examine these new relations alongside Zimbabwe’s changing dynamics of exclusion and inclusion. The book’s starting point is that the crisis is multi-layered in both its provenance and its effects, and is rooted in the complex relationship between contestations over land, processes of rule and state making, and constructions of nation and citizenship.

In considering the crisis in Zimbabwe, the book neither reproduces the narrowly nationalist rhetoric of Zanu (PF), nor adopts uncritically the liberalist counter-position but, rather, argues for the analytic inseparability of questions of land, state, nation and citizenship.

ISBN 9781779220110 | 332 pages | 216 x 140 mm | 2003 | Weaver Press, Zimbabwe | Paperback

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Reviews

'Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business is an excellent collection of topical papers delivered at a conference in Copenhagen in September 2001 that focus on ‘rethinking land, state and citizenship through the Zimbabwean crisis’.'

African Sociological Review

'History will doubtless judge the success or otherwise of Mugabe’s controversial Fast Track land reform programme. In the meantime, anyone interested in contemporary Zimbabwe is strongly urged to read Zimbabwe’s Unfinished Business.'

Oxfam

'This is a well researched and excellently written book which I have read that provides a nuanced and balanced analysis on the contemporary crisis in Zimbabwe.'

Sunday Independent, South Africa

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