Civil society, the state and democracy in Zimbabwe, 1988 – 2014 : hegemonies, polarities and fractures

D.Litt. et Phil. (Development Studies)Abstract: The post-independence ruling class in Zimbabwe carefully combined coercion and consent to assert its hegemony from the day it assumed state power. It implemented this through making use of both civil society and political society. However, this embryonic hegemony started to rupture around 1988 when some civil society organisations began to assert their autonomy from state control. These are the organisations that became the nucleus of a counter-hegemonic alliance that crystallised in the 1990s. This study interrogates state – civil society relations in Zimbabwe between 1988 and 2014, and how these relations have impacted on democratisation. Many studies have characterised state – civil society relations in Zimbabwe as polarised. This polarisation can be understood within Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. One side defined itself around radical-nationalist and redistributionist discourse, while the other emphasised democracy and liberal notions of human rights and good governance. While laying differentiated understandings of democracy, both poles attracted intellectual strata to elaborate on each side’s “ideology”, which resulted in an orbicular broadening of polarisation. This study utilises this characterisation to interrogate the repertoire of state – society relations, and to make a determination on the value proposition of civil society to democracy. One of the contradictions of this polarised engagement was the peripheralisation of other important national questions as two possibilities became modelled as the only alternatives. Thus, the period between 1988 and 2014 witnessed differentiated engagements between the state and civil society, but all defined either within pro-hegemonic or counter-hegemonic terms, yielding either cooperative or confrontational relations shaped by both the state and civil society. This qualitative study, concludes that the current levels of democracy in Zimbabwe, where the old seems to be dying but the new cannot be born yet, are a reflection of struggles and counter-struggles that have tended to negate each other, in the process choking processes of democratisation. It is the enduring phenomenon of polarisation – where only two possibilities are modelled as the only alternatives – which should to be abrogated for true and inclusive democracy to have a chance in Zimbabwe