Only a small number of Africa’s many civil wars since independence have ended with rebel victory, and an even smaller number of those victories have seen rebels transition into successful rulers able to create durable political systems that persisted for decades following the ouster of the ancien regime. In East Africa after Liberation, Fisher considers several flagship cases from the 1980s and 1990s—Uganda’s National Resistance Army (nra), the Rwandan Patriotic Front (rpf), the interlinked Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (eplf), Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (eprdf), and Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. With compelling theoretical insight and rich empirical detail, Fisher shows how, after these “post-liberation” insurgencies won their wars, their leaders then renovated regime politics in the states that they captured and became new governing elites. He also shows how they shaped Africa’s regional politics, both in conjunction and, ultimately, at odds with one another.At its heart, this book is about how revolutionary ideologies about state–society relations were refracted through social relationships within and across insurgency movements both during and after victory. It is about how movement leaders sought to invest their liberation mindsets not only into building cohesive rebel organizations but also into the development of pragmatic solutions to the domestic and regional challenges of maintaining their regimes after victory.In the book’s substantive chapters, Fisher develops this story across three periods, which also serve as key conceptual categories. Taking each rebel movement in turn, Chapters 1 and 2 examine the first category of “insurgency,” the initial period when rebel leaders acquired their liberation ideologies and deployed these ideas in building and sustaining their movements during their wartime experiences. This section also shows how leaders developed relationships across movements based on shared characteristics, ultimately leading to the formation of what Fisher describes as a “collective.”In the second category, “Liberation” (Chapters 3–4) refers to how this distinct category of actors—victorious rebels now rulers—consolidated new regimes at home and built their collective affinities into a formidable regional power bloc in East and Central Africa, while continuing to wear strident revolutionary ideology on their sleeves. Chapters 5 and 6 deal with the culmination of these events into a regional “crisis,” when these four regimes meddled in the Great Lakes and sparked a complex and protracted regional conflict following their ouster of Mobutu Sese Seko, Zaïre’s dictator. Very soon after this episode, by virtue of shifting priorities of regime security and competitive jockeying for regional dominance, the liberation alliance unraveled and issued into the “wars between brothers”—Rwanda vs. Uganda, and Ethiopia vs. Eritrea—still packaged as ideological battles.The main strength of this book is its effort to take seriously the notion that “ideas matter” and to operationalize it theoretically and empirically. Fisher successfully weaves the cases through time while providing conceptual markers for how the ideological frameworks of East African leaders elided and collided with rebel, regime, and regional governance. Yet although the stories of Uganda, Rwanda, Eritrea, and Ethiopia are important to tell, their convergence into a similar theoretical stream deprives the book of comparative leverage vis-à-vis the stories of political development in other African states. This shortcoming is not, however, a deal breaker by any means.Another core strength of this book is Fisher’s ability to build relationships in the field, establishing credibility with key actors and penetrating networks of elites that often refuse to tell outsiders about the inner workings of their politics. For all its refreshing audacity, however, this methodology also points to potential pitfalls, among them the uncritical reproduction of elite narratives. Although Fisher discusses the challenges that accompany this kind of research, the next step should be a more thorough attention to the distinct caveats involved in talking to Africa’s politico-security elites.East Africa after Liberation makes critical contributions to our understanding of the intersections between domestic and regional politics in four pivotal East African states. Whereas the prevailing literature tends to focus on the instrumental motivations of Africa’s political actors, Fisher’s more sociological approach considers the frames of meaning that guide the behavior of the revolutionary elites who had to govern fragile states within contentious neighborhoods. It also has broader implications regarding political order in Africa more generally. This book is essential reading for the study of contemporary African politics.
Read full abstract
Apr 30, 2023
Prathyaksh Janardhanan 
Open Access
