Jonathan Fisher brings personal affinities and changing ideological mindsets back into debates on international relations in Africa. He draws on an astounding empirical base of interviews with political elites of four East African countries: Uganda, Rwanda, Eritrea, and Ethiopia. Fisher thereby shows readers the intimate perspective of those driving regional security policies over the past decades, offering new and convincing arguments on why they go to war or choose to settle.
East Africa after Liberation builds on historical studies recounting the political trajectories of Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, and Eritrea, as well as cross-national analyses from the international relations field, which investigate conflict entanglements in the region. The author is in accord with works emphasizing the importance of sociopolitical causes for regional policies as put forth by, among others, Will Reno, Christopher Clapham, and Paul D. Williams, while challenging opportunism and market-based arguments as found in the works of Alex de Waal and often proclaimed by Western policy makers. However, he also adds a truly novel perspective: that of elites in the region themselves and their personal affinities, aspirations, and eventual accommodations.
Fisher’s monograph presents the following core arguments. First, concerning aspiration: liberation elites transform their ideologies and mindsets when faced with the practicalities of statecraft on their successful ascent to power. Second, on accommodation: ideas and socialization from the liberation struggle era—particularly the notion of violence as the most useful tool in achieving political aims—endure even after assuming office and are transferred onto the regional security arena. Third, on affinity: close social ties during liberalization have led not to enduring friendships but rather to deeply personal feelings of resentment caused by unmet expectations of self-perceived senior statesmen toward their foreign alliance partners, who in turn claim at least equal standing once gaining power in their respective countries.
All three arguments are clearly supported by the vast primary and secondary material studied. The tension between transforming (in the cases mentioned, often socialist) ideological aspirations into pragmatic politics, as opposed to the longue durée of the accommodated liberation struggle’s notion of recurring to violent practices, is a much-needed addition to the debate. It criticizes both the purportedly unchangeable ways of “corrupt” African politics and overly positive appreciations of “new” African elites’ developmental agendas. However, Fisher’s key academic contribution, in my opinion, is his third argument on affinities. Here, he achieves a deeply personal analysis of elites’ interactions over multiple decades, sharing countless anecdotes and perspectives on heated developments between closely related elites as they negotiate, often furiously, the shape of their region’s security framework.
Yet, it nevertheless seems to me that Fisher himself changes his interpretation of the driving factors of East African politics through the course of his writing. In the introduction, he attributes “much of the conflict and tension described in this book” to “the gap between post-liberation regimes’ aspiration and reality” (p. 13). However, he also seems to strongly debunk the ideological narratives of so-called liberation regimes, especially on attaining power—showing the predominance of pragmatic politics within a region hostile to the new regimes, political power struggles among former comrades, and the deeply personal nature of these contests because of their personal affinities. In this sense, Fisher concludes with a drastically changed argument from the one he started with, stating that “much of the high politics of the contemporary Great Lakes and Horn centres, ultimately, around resentment at unmet expectations” (p. 278). Based on this, one could assume that interpersonal elite struggles are more crucial than ideological debates to explaining East Africa’s post-liberation conflicts.
This is not to say that Fisher claims all politics revolve around personal feelings. Rather, he reminds the reader recurrently of the unique approach in his book: he writes not an account of the countries’ histories based on allegedly independent sources, but rather revisits evolving transnational struggles through the lens of the involved elites’ own perspectives. The book thus also offers a very human story—one written in page-turning, beautiful prose—that shows once again how people from their early struggles in the bush war up to the highest echelons of power tend to personalize military, economic, and political struggles. Focusing on this elite perspective on regional developments is in itself a key methodological choice that reverberates in today’s politics of remembrance. For instance, Meles Zenawi warned of a degeneration into “Bonapartism” in 2000 to criticize and purge fellow party members and consolidate his power in Ethiopia’s state (pp. 253–58). In May 2021, Napoleon Bonaparte was recalled much more positively by some political leaders in France as they commemorated him 200 years after his defeat at Waterloo, while others in France and Europe wish to bring his colonial and war atrocities to the fore of public remembrance. From Ethiopia to France, historical facts are thus recurrently reinterpreted through elites’ perspectives. Fisher’s immensely detailed chronology of East Africa’s developments since the 1980s is thus no less accurate or real than more “factual” accounts of the last 50 years.
Fisher’s careful consideration of his methodological basis, of where he positions himself in the data gathering, and what this might have encouraged elite respondents to claim and narrate is another asset of the book. An uncritical reading could have biased and rewritten history in the light of what powerful “victors” (pp. 244–48) or the resentful “vanquished” (pp. 248–53), with their separate political ambitions, pursue. Fisher has put great effort into triangulating data while at the same time allowing much room for extensive—and always both relevant and intriguing— quotations from his more than 130 interviewees.
There is one claim, however, that I do not follow and that does not seem to strengthen the analysis. Fisher asserts that the four countries can and should be seen as “a single conceptual [or analytical] unit” (pp. 24, 38). Nevertheless, he deflates alleged commonalities and shows how their only two combined military endeavors—supporting the SPLM/A in South Sudan (pp. 161–70) and successive rebellions in the two Congo wars (pp. 207–14)— brought to the fore inherent differences between pragmatist (Uganda and Rwanda) and ideational (Ethiopia) or even ideological (Eritrea) approaches. To me, and this surely stems from my own methodological bias, the book reads more as a paired comparison of the heavily interconnected origin of the Ethiopian and Eritrean liberation, on the one hand, and the Ugandan and Rwandan, on the other, as well as each pair’s descent into conflict between one-time “brothers-in-arms” (p. 193).
Seeing the four cases less as exceptions and rather as two extraordinarily relevant paired examples of intermingled rebellion and personal resentment breeding intra-regime and interstate conflict, in fact, reveals the full worth of Fisher’s analysis for innumerable cases beyond East Africa. Patrons’ disappointment with their alleged subordinate proxies can explain Chad’s recurrent volte-face decisions vis-à-vis governments in the Central African Republic. The immediate resort to violence as a tool to subdue domestic criticism is a common theme in many post-rebellion states and becomes ever more intriguing when both the opposition and government bring in rebel-era external allies into the fray to make their case and discredit the other. This can be seen, for instance, in the recent split of South Sudan’s SPLA and elites’ varying recourse to Uganda, Ethiopia, or Sudan. If the liberation ideology of the four regimes was thus more a discourse than a practice, it would be fascinating to reflect on how Fisher’s findings on affinities between formerly allied rebels across borders also occur in settings outside East Africa.
East Africa after Liberation is not simply a historical chronology of four liberation movements and their changing faces when they came to power. It is a convincing analysis of the regional security arena through a rare glimpse behind the curtain of elite mindsets and cross-state affinities. As such it is a must read for scholars and practitioners hoping to understand today’s enduring security challenges in East Africa: the enduring Eritrea-Ethiopia border disputes, the Congo wars’ legacy, Rwanda’s ascension as a development state, Uganda’s regime intransigence, Ethiopia’s war in Tigray, and especially all four countries’ extensive involvement in military operations across the continent from Somalia to the Central African Republic to Liberia. As a local rather than regional security scholar myself, East Africa after Liberation has truly opened my eyes. It convinced me that the growing emphasis on the micropolitics of conflict in Africa shows only half the medallion without an intimate look at elite relations across borders, as Fisher has so aptly portrayed for East Africa.
