I thank Dr. Glawion for his generous and thoughtful engagement with East Africa after Liberation. I am particularly gratified by his final comment on the value of exploring elite relations as a window into conflict. The book, as Glawion notes, maintains a particular focus on the personal ties linking together the politico-security elite of Eritrea, Ethiopia, Rwanda, and Uganda since the 1980s—and the impact of these relationships and their disintegration on regional (in)security. I was conscious of the potential pitfalls of presenting an elite-centric narrative, particularly when recent valuable work on the “everyday” character of insecurity— including Glawion’s important book—underscores how distant and tenuous the machinations of presidents and generals can be for those not living in major cities. There is a rich and vibrant literature on the micropolitics of East Africa’s conflict theaters; East Africa after Liberation tells a different but complementary story.
Glawion raises two challenges regarding the book’s analysis. First, the study begins with an assessment of East African politics based in unmet ideational aspirations but ends with one based more in pragmatic, interpersonal, elite discord. Second, the four post-liberation elites under study are better understood as a paired comparison (Uganda-Rwanda and Ethiopia-Eritrea) than as a single conceptual unit. The parting of ways the book charts between these pairs vis-à-vis support for liberation-style insurgencies in the region during the 1990s is cited in support of this suggestion.
The key point here is that ideology is not best understood as detached from, or the reverse of, pragmatic or personal considerations—in international security as in everyday life. In addition to their comparable guerrilla experiences and approaches, these four movements marshaled and leveraged a shared language of liberation, revolution and pan-African solidarity. They did so in a manner that consciously articulated and imagined their regional and domestic activities as that of a bloc with shared ideational commitments and aspirations: a discourse-turned-reality that a range of African and Western political and intellectual elites helped embed in policy interventions and scholarly frameworks.
As the book underscores, the four movements deployed this language for pragmatic purposes—to defend military interventions and support for foreign insurgencies—but this was not simply a cynical instrumentalization of ideology. Ideological content is more promiscuous and amorphous than that, and seeking to dislodge it from personal, strategic, and pragmatic considerations can be unhelpful. Indeed, the differences that emerged between—and within—the two pairs can be partly explained by disappointment and rage on the part of all four actors that what each had assumed was a shared intellectual agenda was, in fact, four competing interpretations derived from different experiences, contexts, and ideological registers.
In other words, ideas of liberation, revolution, solidarity, loyalty, and pan-Africanism allowed this group to construct themselves as a unit on coming to power and gave shape to their various regional interventions. The same ideas or, rather, perceptions of their disavowal helped structure the group’s collapse. I would therefore qualify Glawion’s suggestion that “the liberation ideology…was thus more a discourse than a practice” by arguing that it was— indeed is— both; the discourse and practice are often mutually constituted. As he emphasizes, this could well be a fruitful lens for exploring the evolution of relations between rebels-turned-governments across the continent and further afield.
