Event Date: March 5, 2018 - 12:00 to 13:30
Location: FSS 4004, 120 University Private

David Moore, Professor of Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg, has been trying to figure out the complexities and contradictions of Zimbabwean politics since 1984, when he started fieldwork for his York University doctorate. Since then he has written about 60 interventions of various sorts on Zimbabwe’s history, political economy, elections, and parties. One of his more recent works, in 2015, is “Robert Mugabe: An Intellectual Manqué and his Moments of Meaning”, in Sabelo Gatsheni-Ndlovu’s edited Mugabeism? History, Politics and Power in Africa. When he is not researching and writing on Zimbabwe he detours into theory that might be applied to ‘development’, trying to wind his way through the brutal Marxism of primitive accumulation and the softer variant, Gramscian ideas of hegemony – ending up with something between tragic and magic realism. Examples of that foray would be “Conflict and After: Primitive Accumulation, Hegemonic Formation, and Democratic Deepening” in a 2015 edition of the journal Stability and “An Arc of Authoritarianism over Africa: Toward the End of a Liberal Democratic Dream” in The Socialist Register, 2016. He is now working on a book tentatively entitled From Comrades to Coups: Robert Mugabe, ZANU-PF, and their Zimbabwe.