This chapter maps the history of efforts of Black Consciousness activists to rebuild their shattered armed wing post-1976. It advances the story in exile through a careful look at attempts at Black Consciousness organizing to restart their armed struggle. This tenaciousness, ever-present in the Azanian Black Nationalist Tradition, highlights the continued importance and relevance of Black Consciousness to the eventual fall of apartheid post-1977. They continued to fight up until 1993 despite the ANC actively obstructing and preventing state or NGO support from being given to organizations under the Black Consciousness banner. These newer formations (IRE, SAYRCO and AZANLA) would engage closely with the wider Third World Revolution and find ways to adopt different lessons, tactics, strategies, theories and perspectives into their ever-expanding political praxis. This did not lessen or dilute their Black Consciousness praxis; on the contrary, it complimented its theoretical and organizational capacities. Nevertheless, the lack of state support, unevenness in centring the gender question, the continued strength of the apartheid war machine and serious disagreements among different Black Consciousness factions hurt the movement in exile. Regardless, they continued to fight.

This chapter presents the first empirical test of the theory using a paired case comparison of two rebel groups that are highly similar organizationally, had the same knowledge of the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) governance, operated in the same place and the same time in Eritrea, but had two different goals: the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF). The ELF leadership articulated moderately transformative goals and although rebel leaders were familiar with the CCP’s governance, they decided to introduce but a partial imitation of it. By contrast, the EPLF articulated more transformative, revolutionary goals and explicitly decided to imitate the CCP’s governance almost exactly, even when the EPLF’s governance provoked violent civilian resistance. Because these two organizations were similar in all ways but the transformativity of their long-term goals, the empirical evidence strongly supports the theoretical claims. The chapter draws heavily from archival materials collected in the United States, United Kingdom and rebel primary sources.

This chapter presents an overview of the history of humanitarian efforts as seen according to a new periodisation scheme, which identifies three main phases of engagement. These are the laissez-faire 'ad hoc humanitarianism' of the nineteenth century, the 'organised humanitarianism' associated with Taylorism and mass society (c. 1900–70), and the 'expressive humanitarianism' characterising the period since 1968. We combine this with background information on the context of the three case studies: relief efforts during the Great Irish Famine of the 1840s; the famine that ravaged Soviet Russia and the Ukraine in 1921–3; and the devastating famine in Ethiopia of the mid-1980s.

Chapter 5 explores the collapse of the EPRDF-PFDJ and NRM-RPF relationships between 1998 and 2001, until that point the main fulcrum of regional security policy for all four governing elites. The chapter explains how longstanding tensions within both pairings rose violently to the surface during this period. At the heart of both disagreements were feelings of superiority and inferiority dating back to affinities established during the struggle era and deep-seated militarism within each movement. These conflicts were, however, catalysed by changes in all four movements’ regional position in the post-liberation era. The intensely personal nature of EPRDF-PFDJ and NRM-RPF elite relations prior to this point, it is argued, rendered the subsequent violence and inter-state antagonism all the more acute and damaging, and the chapter underlines the significant regional repositioning the clashes forced all four states to undergo, and the unlikely regional alliances that this led to.

Chapter 6 chronicles the fragmentation of the four sets of post-liberation elites, and the purging of many established veterans between the late 1990s and ca. 2006. The chapter shows how each movement during these years was shaken to its foundations by internal criticism and major splits which pitted the leadership and a new, younger generation of loyalists against many senior liberation war cadres. Though these splits were notionally focused around questions of movement governance and leadership they were provoked by regional security crises. Indeed, in all four cases, debates on loyalty, ideological purity and movement integrity were laid on top of more long-standing disagreements on each movement’s relationship with its struggle-era regional ally. In mapping these splits and the removal of a significant part of the founding post-liberation elite from the policy arena, this chapter demonstrates how fundamentally inter-linked regional and domestic politics have been in these four states, at least with regard to relations with states governed by a one-time liberation war partner. It also underscores the degree to which gaining and maintaining office can be intrinsically destabilising – even destructive – for militarised, revolutionary movements such as those examined in this study.

This chapter, together with Chapter 1, introduces the four East African liberation movements individually and as part of a distinct collective, a collective whose politico-military leadership would push to re-structure regional politics in the decade that followed its ascent to power. In doing so, the chapters delineate not only the ideas and relationships developed in the bush that would later shape regional politics but also how these ideas and relationships were themselves constantly shaped and re-shaped by contingency and context – as they would continue to be following victory. Chapter 2 focuses on the four movements’ liberation struggles themselves, explaining how support structures, wartime experiences and the manner in which each liberation struggle ended moulded each movement and its elite and set it on a particular path in the post-liberation era.

This chapter explores how the four East African liberation movements transitioned into governments and begun to negotiate their place within the region. The central argument of this chapter is that the early regional relationships of EPRDF, EPLF and NRM post-liberation elites were dominated by pragmatic, domestic preoccupations, and managing tensions with, and the distrust of, regional counterparts. Revolutionary change, at least at the regional level, was therefore far from being a lodestar. Diplomatically isolated for much of its first decade in power, NRM Uganda found itself in an instantly antagonistic set of relationships with its conservative neighbours, who feared it would seek to replicate its revolution in their own territories. Seeking to allay these concerns, Kampala promoted itself as a regional conflict mediator in Somalia and vacillated in its support for the RPF, which launched its first invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. In the Horn, EPRDF and EPLF elites focused mainly on settling the question of Eritrean independence and the shape of post-liberation Ethiopia’s political and constitutional order. The elites of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda first came together in the early 1990s around shared security concerns – the perceived threat from Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist Sudan – rather than ideological agendas.

Chapter 4 explains how an initially defensive alliance between the post-liberation elites of the region developed into a more philosophical, aspirational and militarised one, focused – putatively – around promoting regional liberation projects. The chapter demonstrates how summitry around support for the South Sudanese SPLM/A during this period provided a space for the four movements to share ideas on promoting wider regional transformation, most notably in Zaïre – a notion that spoke to their shared heritage as liberation movements and shared understanding of violence as an effective reform mechanism. The chapter cautions, however, against understanding the four elites’ involvement in the Zaïre/Congo wars as motivated by a coherent understanding of, and commitment to, regional liberation. The Horn movements’ engagement took place at a much more theoretical and superficial level than those of the Great Lakes, and elites in Addis Ababa, Asmara and Kampala took a quite different view on legitimate ways to promote liberation in Zaïre to counterparts in Kigali. The chapter also reflects, then, on the challenges encountered by post-liberation movements in reframing their country’s place in regional security frameworks, and in reimagining struggle era ideational frameworks in a new context.

This chapter, together with Chapter 2, introduces the four East African liberation movements individually and as part of a distinct collective, a collective whose politico-military leadership would push to re-structure regional politics in the decade that followed its ascent to power. In doing so, the chapters delineate not only the ideas and relationships developed in the bush that would later shape regional politics but also how these ideas and relationships were themselves constantly shaped and re-shaped by contingency and context – as they would continue to be following victory. Chapter 1 focuses on the movements as ideological and social entities, charting the ideational, sociopolitical and organisational underpinnings of each, and their links to one another.

This chapter introduces the purpose and core arguments of the book, which focuses on exposing, examining and underlining the acute challenges faced by East African post-liberation movements seeking to re-structure and transform regional politics. The analysis that follows argues for the importance of common ideological, ideational and aspirational frameworks around pan-Africanism and liberation across the four post-liberation elites in their negotiation of a place in the region. The conceptual framework developed nonetheless also underlines how far these movements needed to accommodate a range of competing forces and pressures in the years following their victories, reformist ambitions often sitting uncomfortably alongside the practicalities of regional diplomacy and, increasingly, regime maintenance and intra-movement politics. The chapter also emphasises the importance of understanding these post-liberation elites as social, as well as ideological and pragmatic, actors.