Ndebele–Shona ethnic animosities came to the fore before, during and after the June and July 1985 general elections. Violence shifted from wartime residual to ethnic-based violence. The Zimbabwe government was heavily influenced by strong ethnic identities and the military. Ethnic polarisation problems stood out as the major challenge to nation building in Zimbabwe. Ethnic differences were key drivers of election violence in 1985. The 1985 elections took place against a backdrop of bitter and mutual mistrust between Zanu PF and PF Zapu, personified by Mugabe and Nkomo, and their Shona- and Ndebele-based political support, respectively. The problem of dissidents in parts of Matabeleland and the Midlands, as well as Fifth Brigade reprisals not only against the bandits but also civilians in these regions, openly played out ethnic hostilities between these two main political rivalries. Zanu PF ran the country under a state of emergency justified on the three grounds of containing the dissident problem, dealing with Mozambican Renamo bandits from the eastern border and the destabilisation attacks by the then apartheid South African military. There was no genuine or concerted effort to heal the wounds of war by all sides despite a rhetorical reconciliation policy.

If the Vietnamese invasion of Cambodia helped to shatter an already ailing anti-imperialist internationalism, a concomitant refugee crisis offered the rival vision of human rights internationalism a remarkable opportunity to fill the void. What remained of the anti-imperialist left contributed little to resolving the issue, yet the human rights internationalists stepped into the breach. Former French radicals turned humanitarians worked with Vietnamese refugees, Eastern European dissidents, and human rights groups such as Doctors Without Borders to organize a campaign against human rights violations in Vietnam. They chartered a hospital ship to rescue the refugees, which amounted to interfering in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation-state, showcasing a new kind of humanitarian interventionism. At the same time, they internationalized the campaign, even winning the support of the US government, which was only too happy to use the crisis to rewrite the history of the war, rebrand itself as a virtuous nation, and shine a harsh spotlight on the Socialist Republic of Vietnam. Despite efforts to deflect charges of rights violations, the SRV could do little to explain itself in the face of undeniable evidence of repression. If anti-imperialism helped secure their international victory in the 1960s, human rights sealed their defeat a decade later. The remaining radicals in the North Atlantic fought back but had little to offer as an alternative. With the core notions of the Leninist problematic in question, the radical left’s vision of internationalism lost its appeal, particularly among a new generation of activists looking for a way to do good in the world. And with anti-imperialism’s influence over the wider progressive milieu slipping, human rights internationalism made a giant leap in consolidating its hegemony, so much so that even some committed anti-imperialists ended up accepting its terms as the least bad option.

In 1989, those demanding human rights to reform the system versus those who fought to leave it combined to create an explosive crisis for the SED. Human rights served not just to rally a heterogeneous coalition of dissidents, but also provided an ideological justification for SED officials to dismantle their own power structure and abolish the party’s monopoly on power in the face of mass demonstrations and mass emigration. In planning for a new East Germany, former SED officials worked with dissidents to draft a constitution that would secure liberal democratic rights and freedoms alongside rights that would preserve the ideals of the socialist project. In 1990, however, the joint hopes of dissident activists and reform communists were dashed as the realities of East German economic collapse turned the population away from new utopian ideas towards realising human rights through reunification with the Federal Republic. The idealistic anti-capitalism of the dissident elite alienated a population that wanted both democracy and prosperity through human rights. While the dissidents were successful in ending state-socialist dictatorship through their campaign for human rights, they ultimately failed to expand upon the narrow and unsatisfactory human rights system of the capitalist West.

Chapter 4 looks at the beginnings of human rights dissent in East Germany, starting with the Christian churches in 1968 as part of a plebiscite on a new socialist constitution during the International Year for Human Rights. Although Christians were among the loudest voices calling for the entrenchment of human rights during the discussions surrounding the constitution, Protestant church leaders decided, in the wake of the Helsinki Accords, to endorse the SED’s claims to realise human rights. In so doing, they hoped to gain recognition from the state and more effectively facilitate private protests against state abuses of their congregants. Many seeking to leave the GDR turned to human rights provisions in the Helsinki Accords and other international agreements to argue their case, but when these demands were refused human rights rhetoric was largely abandoned. Similarly, while the East German intelligentsia became increasingly disillusioned with the GDR in the 1970s, few wanted to take up the cause of human rights against the SED for fear of being seen as endorsing Western anti-communism.

The end of the GDR in 1990 also resulted in the erasure of human rights alternatives to capitalist West German norms developed before reunification. The idea of “socialist human rights” collapsed in tandem with SED rule, and many of its own proponents evolved into democrats who renounced their earlier work on the subject. East German dissidents and feminists – who advocated for conceptions of democratic rights and rights to bodily self-determination in conflict with those established in West Germany – were deemed to be deviant and marginalised. While some dissidents saw reunification as the ultimate triumph of the mass demonstrations of 1989, others saw it as a lost opportunity to create a better form of democracy and human rights.

In the 1980s, many disillusioned East Germans dropped out of the official social system and created a parallel civil society within the Protestant Church, striving towards disarmament, demilitarisation and environmentalism. While these activists sought to eschew politics, the SED’s repression of a social sphere outside of party-approved organisations demonstrated to many that political reform was imperative to achieving even purely moral goals such as peace. In 1986, a small group of activists created the Initiative for Peace and Human Rights, sparking a rallying cry for disparate groups of disaffected East Germans, who invoked human rights not as the antithesis of socialism but as a core value forgotten and abused by the SED. Simultaneously, the SED’s ideological bulwark against such a movement began to crumble as it sought to create a socialist version of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Despite initial enthusiasm from allies who saw it as a means to unify the socialist world against Western pressure, one country after another pulled out, scared off by various human rights guarantees contained within. Simultaneously, reformers began to see human rights as a rhetorical tool to liberalise sclerotic political institutions to save the socialist project as a whole.

In this concluding chapter, I briefly recap the main findings and then examine their broader implications. The case of Wukan Village shows how the strategy of informal control can be effective in the short run but backfire in the long run. The most effective check on autocratic state power is unlikely to come from the state itself, but from an adversarial relationship between local civil society and the state. Independent community leaders and activists who can mobilize their groups and threaten officials with broad-based political mobilization can even the balance of power between the state and society, and create meaningful incentives for responsiveness.