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1 - History, Authority and the Law in Zimbabwe, 1950–2002

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 August 2021

Susanne Verheul
Affiliation:
University of Oxford
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Summary

Chapter 1 expands on the relationship between history, law and politics in Zimbabwe. It traces historical trends in the mobilisation of law’s coercive power by consecutive colonial and post-colonial governments, locates the development of legal consciousness in citizens’ relations to the colonial legal system and examines debates over ‘professionalism’ and ‘justice’ between the executive and the judiciary, and within the judiciary itself. It then situates the attacks on members of the judiciary and the rule of law after 2000 in the context of ZANU-PF’s mobilisation of a selective historical narrative, its ‘patriotic history’, to argue that conceptualisations of justice took on fundamentally new forms which shape the understandings of the legitimacy of law and its relation to state authority explored within this thesis, but which are rooted in this longer history.

Type
Chapter
Information
Performing Power in Zimbabwe
Politics, Law, and the Courts since 2000
, pp. 33 - 59
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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