This paper will proceed in three parts. The first will present an analytic perspective - of ‘legacy, practice and counterbalance’ – that conceptualises effective, purposive power, and its pursuit by aspirants to both enduring and transformative politics.
It will recast in raw political terms a consolidating awareness in the economic development literature of how context-specific political practice underpins all successful development. Like all forms of enduring politics, developmental politics is about managing, transcending (and rarely resolving) apparent contradictions between fused and diffused, embedded and autonomous, coercing and inducing forms of power. It is about deploying the resources (cultural, organisational, ideological) that come to hand in a particular context to address problems as they present themselves - adaptively and iteratively, not according to abstract blueprints.
The second part will highlight how the comparative literature on Ethiopia, Rwanda and Uganda has deployed analyses of power and context that over-emphasise similarities between contemporary political regimes in the three countries - encouraging partial and polarised perspectives on the three, as a group and individually.
The Uganda National Resistance Army/Movement (NRA/M) the Rwanda Patriotic Army/Front (RPA/F) and the Tigrayan Peoples Liberation Front/Ethiopia Peoples’ Revolutionary Democratic Front (TPLF/EPRDF) have not generally been considered in the literature in relation to one another. They have more typically been considered, together, in contrast to other military-political groupings in some wider comparative exercise. Examples of this include the treatment of the three movements in studies of rebellion and insurgency; of ‘post-liberation’ politics; of ‘new authoritarians’, ‘donor darlings’; and (potentially) developmental regimes. While there are strong justifications for viewing the three regimes as a ‘group’, this approach compromises our chances of achieving a fully nuanced appreciation of their respective characteristics.
The third part will show how a legacy, practice and counterbalance perspective is already deployed implicitly – often explicitly – in much of the non-comparative literature on the three countries. It will demonstrate how a consistent, comparative application of this perspective can draw out under-examined points of difference between the three regimes, and enhance our understanding of each - in relation both to one another, and to notions of ‘developmental politics’.
The unchosen legacies and political practice of each of the regimes will be sketched out; how they have deployed the political resources to hand to manage and transcend the specific political problems they have faced, and to approximate the counterbalanced exercise of power that underpins both political longevity and developmental effectiveness.
Rwanda – over-interpreting a favourable legacy? The Rwanda Patriotic Front insists it is building on an embedded constellation of power, and that the inherent legitimacy of this power is further strengthened by the developmental outcomes it has achieved. Scholars are rightly sceptical of this discourse, but rarely entirely dismissive. The questions they raise fall broadly into two categories. The first examines how far the regime over-interprets its unquestionably favourable legacy for enduring and transformative power. The second explores how far it over-reaches, and over-states the skill with which it has fashioned and deployed the political resources that constitute this legacy.
Uganda – embeddedness at all costs? The literature has long had to acknowledge the brute fact of the NRM’s enduring power. A ‘counterbalance’ of sorts is acknowledged, in other words, but it is typically (and understandably) cast in negative terms, as a pathological balance of patronage and repression. Recent analyses of the highly personalised, ‘inducement’ end of NRM politics suggest, however, that the overweaning reliance on crude patronage might represent a persistent search by the regime for an ‘embeddedness’ denied it by history. An additional, revisionist, interpretation is also dimly discernible; that the dysfunctional counterbalanced power established in Uganda could evolve and muster to itself more transformative potential over time.
Ethiopia – reconciling the irreconcilable? In Ethiopia, ideas of counterbalance have been particularly explicit in official discourse and practice. The TPLF was consciously spawned in the cross currents of visionary Marxism-Leninism and embedded Tigrean Nationalism - just as the EPRDF was crafted, twenty years later, to pursue a deliberately paradoxical amalgam of ‘ethnic federalism’ and ‘revolutionary democracy’. Scholars have charged, however, that the regime – through a combination of only partially reconstructed highland chauvinism, vanguard elitism and ‘developmental’ impatience – has lacked the subtlety, open-ness and egalitarian impulse to embed its power authentically across Ethiopia. It also seems legitimate to question how any regime – however grounded and ingenious – might establish stable, compelling, embraceable politics across an entire post-imperial context as diverse and contested as Ethiopia.