The Mobutu Regime: Leveraging State Weakness
Journal Title: Studies in African Languages and Cultures - Year 2014, Vol 1, Issue 48
Abstract
This paper focuses on regime survival in Zaire/Congo. The author will analyse the events in Zaire during Joseph Mobutu’s reign from 1960 to 1997 through the lens of regime and linkage theories. It is no secret that President Mobutu came to power with Western (US and Belgian) assistance. It is also no surprise that Mobutu was dependent on Western support to remain in power. But it is remarkable that when this support was suddenly withdrawn after the Cold War, Mobutu was able to resist both Western pressure to abdicate and internal opposition, and did so successfully until he was invaded by his smaller neighbours and fled in May 1997. If Mobutu was so dependent on Western support, how did he manage to keep his regime afloat at a time when diplomatic and financial ties were severed? How is it possible that he was able to cling on to power with democratic protests on his doorstep, with no capable army and no alternative great powers to court? The author will show that a combination of regime and linkage theories can formulate answer to these questions by linking the domestic and external relations in one model. This text will not provide a full historical overview of the events in Congo/Zaire from 1960 to 1997, but only pick out those phases, which are necessary to explain regime behaviour.
Authors and Affiliations
Jeroen Bosch van den
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP71340
- DOI -
- Views 79
- Downloads 0
Roger Blench and Stuart McGill (eds.), Advances in Minority Language Research in Nigeria, vol. I, African Languages Monographs, Kay Williamson Educational Foundation, Köln: Rüdiger Köppe Verlag, 2012, 372 pp.
A review of a book " Advances in Minority Language Research in Nigeria, vol. I, African Languages Monographs" by Roger Blench and Stuart McGill (eds.).
Grammaticalization as emergence of functional domains: three cases in Chadic
The importance of the first grammaticalization described in this paper is that it has created a morphological means for coding functions that have not been described before. The ultimate source of these grammaticalizatio...
Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa – sangoma, African sage, fraud or a New Age shaman?
Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa is a South African sangoma, a writer and artist, and a controversial ‘expert’ on UFO-related conspiracy theories. He considers himself an expert on South African, especially Zulu, cultures and reli...
Nina Pawlak, Ewa Siwierska, Izabela Will (eds.), Hausa and Chadic Studies in Honour of Professor Stanisław Piłaszewicz, Warsaw: Dom Wydawniczy Elipsa, 2014, 271 pp.
Review of the book "Hausa and Chadic Studies in Honour of Professor Stanisław Piłaszewicz" by Nina Pawlak, Ewa Siwierska and Izabela Will
Al-Hausawi, Al-Hindawi: Media Contraflow, Urban Com-munication and Translinguistic Onomatopoeia among Hausa of Northern Nigeria
In this paper I looked at three styles of vocal performances in the domestication of transnational source text into Hausa. The first was the onomatopoeic use of selected Qur’anic texts by Hausa shamans for their public c...