The Legacies of Liberation: Path Dependence, Institutional Change, and Political Development in Southern Africa

My book explains historical origins of the divergent political and social legacies of liberation in post-settler colonial Southern Africa: Angola, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zimbabwe. These countries share similar political histories of prolonged settler colonialism, racial domination, and violent anticolonialist liberation struggles dominating the second-half of the 20th century. Moreover, following these conflicts, revolutionary national liberal movements (NLMs) with radical agendas to fundamentally transform inherited state and social structures assumed state power between 1974 and 1994 and have since dominated the national political arena in all five countries. However, the countries’ post-liberation trajectories have diverged sharply, producing markedly different political regimes, patterns of social structural inequality and forms of national polarization and social cleavages.

What explains these contrasting legacies in contemporary Southern Africa? Existing dominant approaches tend to emphasize more deterministic structures of the settler-colonial era, politics and institutions of armed conflict, or more recent country-specific events after independence. Additionally, these approaches dominated by case studies either struggle to explain cross-national variation or generalize from a small number of better-studied cases. The result is fragmented and insufficient comparative understanding of post-liberation political development in post-settler colonial Southern Africa, reinforced by an historical-intellectual divide between Lusophone- and Anglophone-country scholarship.

The book develops a path-dependent explanation that emphasizes a critical juncture I define as the “liberation reform period.” During this episode, revolutionary liberation elites assumed political power in all five countries and adopted consequential reform policy choices about how to restructure the state, institutions, and society they had inherited. Faced with varying sets of political opportunities and constraints, they pursued three broad reform approaches: radical (Mozambique and Angola), liberal (South Africa and Namibia), and abortive-liberal (Zimbabwe) reform approach. Defined in terms of state restructuring, socioeconomic redistribution and transformation, and nation-building strategies, these reform packages differed widely in the pace and scope of change, ranging from rapid and fundamental transformation in the radical contexts to limited and gradual reforms in the liberal national settings. Moreover, the book shows that the reform choices were contingent outcomes not predetermined by structural factors with well-known, theoretically predicted outcomes. Rather, they emerged from domestic antecedent conditions and world-historical setting of liberation that defined the political opportunities and challenges faced by key actors during the critical juncture. As Theda Skocpol (1979) seminally argued, most revolutionary actors in the region pursues reform agendas that departed from their ideological aspirations and goals.

The book then argues that these reform choices led to divergent trajectories of political and macro-social change by producing distinct institutional and socio-structural configurations that generated a series of political backlashes and counter-backlashes among opposition forces and liberation regimes. Radical reforms generated a violent “conservative backlash” by counterrevolutionary armed groups seeking regime change; liberal reforms provoked a “social-democratic backlash” by popular sectors demanding progressive policy changes for greater redistribution and social inclusion; and abortive-liberal reforms generated a “liberal backlash” for democratic regime change. These reactions and counterreactions contributed to various forms of path-dependent institutional adaptation, reconfiguration, and reproduction of reform-period structures. The more stable institutional and social structural legacies emerged after resolution of political conflicts, and reflected both the structures produced during the critical liberation episode as well as the consequences of structural changes in subsequent decades.

These legacies encompass: less inclusive party-state authoritarianism and national societies with relatively moderate post-racial social disparities and conflicts (i.e., Angola and Mozambique), a militarized authoritarianism and a less unequal but highly polarized post-racial society (Zimbabwe), and broadly inclusive liberal-social democracy with extremely unequal societies polarized by both inherited racial and newer post-racial divisions (i.e., South Africa and Namibia).

The book therefore treats political liberation not simply as the end of settler colonial rule or white-minority domination, but as a critical juncture in political development. The argument does not discount the continuing influence of colonial structures or wartime legacies. Rather, it shows why these antecedents alone cannot explain the marked cross-national variation in post-liberation political and social outcomes. The reform strategies adopted at the turning point of liberation provide greater leverage for systematically explaining why countries with broadly similar histories and revolutionary projects subsequently followed different paths.

The historical argument, developed using comparative-historical and qualitative methods, draws on extensive archival evidence, a reinterpretation of secondary sources, and statistical data on various political, socioeconomic, and institutional measures. This layered evidentiary strategy, with systematic cross-case comparison and temporal analysis, allowed a fine-grained evaluation of alternative explanations centered on historical conditions or emphasizing alternative periods as critical junctures. Colonial structures—institutional, economic, and social—and war-

time factors remain important, yet the liberation reform episode emerges as the critical historical juncture that better explains the divergent paths of political and sociological change in post-settler colonial Southern Africa.

This approach has a well-established pedigree in comparative-historical research. Classic studies by Barrington Moore Jr. (Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy, 1966), Theda Skocpol (States and Social Revolutions, 1979), Charles Tilly (From Mobilization to Revolution, 1978), and Robert Putnam (Making Democracy Work, 1993), for example, combine close historical reconstruction with broad cross-national comparison to connect actor strategies to longer-term trajectories.

The overall argument has broader implications for comparative and African politics, particularly the study of regime development, democratization, and post-conflict social dynamics following national revolutions, protracted conflicts, and other episodes of contentious politics. The book also develops a more dynamic understanding of path dependence that accounts for both institutional persistence and gradual change. Whereas early theorizing emphasized lock-in, self-reinforcement, and persistence, these dynamic framework treats institutional continuity and incremental change as the defining properties of path dependence: institutional reproduction is routinely accompanied—and enabled—by continuous adaptation, innovation, and adjustment rather than mere self-reinforcement or stasis. Unlike endogenous models of gradual institutional change, which emphasize open-ended path-independent transformation, path-dependent change is rather adaptive, incremental, and path-bound change constrained by earlier choices. Moreover, in this dynamic and broader framework of path dependence, self-reinforcing and non-reinforcing feedbacks often operate simultaneously and in opposing directions in any context: whereas the former stabilizes and reproduces existing institutions, the latter typically generates institutional instability, transformation, and eventual replacement.

The book’s core empirical argument has been published in an article form as “Path Dependence and Institutional Change: Explaining the Legacies of Liberation in Southern Africa,” Studies in Comparative International Development, August 2026.

The book manuscript was discussed in a day-long workshop in October 2025 at The University Chicago, generously supported by a grant from the Center for International Social Science Research (CISSR). Evan Lieberman (MIT), Dan Slater (University of Michigan), Hillel David Soifer (UC Berkeley), and Adrienne LeBas (American University) kindly served as external reviewers. I have since completed revising the manuscript, except for the concluding chapter, and I am preparing it for submission to Cambridge University Press.