Sara Rich Dorman’s Understanding Zimbabwe is an important and interventionist text on contemporary Zimbabwean politics. Indeed, writing about Zimbabwean recent history and politics can be both a courageous and perilous endeavor. In 2009, for instance, a heated scholarly debate ensued in response to Mahmood Mamdani’s essay in the London Review of Books (December) that he titled “Lessons of Zimbabwe.” The article received an excoriating critique from thirty-five Zimbabweanist and Zimbabwean scholars who accused this accomplished scholar of a woefully jaundiced perspective on postcolonial Zimbabwe and concluded that “intellectuals such as Mamdani should display more responsibility and less posturing in their attempts to draw meaningful lessons from Zimbabwe” (see “Letters,” http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/letters). Dorman’s book does more than offer a responsible analysis of contemporary Zimbabwe; it also dispels myths and shallow analyses of the recent Zimbabwean past.

As Dorman observes at the outset, scholarly analyses of not just Zimbabwe, but of African politics in general, are mostly animated by contemporaneous debates and concerns, to the detriment of explaining change and continuity. Understanding Zimbabwe makes an emphatic case for the historical interconnections in political processes that have shaped the political evolution of the Zimbabwean nation, from the 1970s anticolonial nationalist period to the post-2000 era. Even as Dorman builds on the rich scholarly treatises on Zimbabwean politics, she diverges sharply from the recent “crisis scholarship” on Zimbabwe that elevates the politics of disorder and patrimonialism without a clear sense of the complexity of Zimbabwe’s recent history. The book is a work of political science, but Dorman is very sensitive to history and asserts from the outset that “if we move beyond paying lip-service to history, we can integrate the power of people’s experiences into our analysis of political science in Africa” (9).

The book is organized chronologically, beginning with what the author identifies as the politics of “liberation” (1965–1980), to “inclusion” (1980–1987), “durability” (1987–1997), “polarization” (1998–2000), “exclusion” (2000–2008), and “winner-takes-all” (2008–2014). Dorman presents Zimbabwe’s anticolonial liberation struggle, with its characteristic ambiguities and contestations over how to imagine a postcolonial and inclusive nation, as not just background history for present-day Zimbabwe. That legacy of the liberation struggle, with its ambiguous and awkward politics of limited pluralism, is, in fact, the crucial piece of the puzzle for understanding the competing political interests that later unfolded in postcolonial Zimbabwe. It is this period that gave birth to Zimbabwe’s independence in 1980, in which Robert Mugabe’s ZANU (and later ZANU-PF) began to construct a hegemonic and only quasi-inclusionary political society based mostly on quiescence and demobilization of competing liberation war camps. According to Dorman, this period created an illusion of consent built on a shaky rhetoric of inclusion of social interest groups such as peasants, workers, business, churches, and others, but actually closed out alternative social and political spaces beyond the ruling party.

This 1980s illusion of consent ruptured toward the 1990s as the ruling government began to suffer fiscal exhaustion and unprecedented economic pressures. Dorman argues that, with dwindling financial and material resources, ZANU-PF could not sustain this false inclusivity. With the eruption of urban and labor unrests in the 1990s in the wake of IMF/World Bank–sponsored Structural Adjustment Programs, and with the uncomfortable evidence of massive government economic corruption, the Zimbabwean government found itself struggling to maintain a “durable” state. Dorman identifies some of the salient histories at the root of the unraveling politics of inclusion, such as the aggressive financial demands of former veterans of the liberation war (which ZANU-PF acceded to, with grave consequences for the tottering Zimbabwean economy), the rise of political dissenting voices in the mold of new political parties, vocal NGOs, civic society groups, and gender pressure groups. In short, the period 1987–1997 revealed the fragility of the Zimbabwean postcolonial project.

The last two chapters reflect on the familiar “crisis” that has gripped Zimbabwe for the past decade and half. Dorman’s analysis of the period from the late 1990s to the 2000s eschews the typical “crisis scholarship” by reading closely the evolution of political polarization. On one side is a coalesced civic society under the banner of the National Constitutional Assembly (NCA). On the other side is a hyper-nationalistic ZANU-PF, which has rediscovered its penchant for authoritarianism and violence in order to stave off mounting opposition. During this period Mugabe’s ZANU-PF suffered multiple electoral defeats on several fronts: constitutional, legislative, and gubernatorial, only managing to sustain the executive presidency through heavy manipulation of the vote and deploying state- and militia-sponsored violence. The brief 2008–2013 Global Political Agreement that was brokered after the disputed 2008 elections between ZANU-PF and the main opposition party, the MDC, finally unraveled with Mugabe’s quest to win back total political control through the abrupt announcement of the 2013 elections.

Dorman consistently argues that for students of African politics (and history as well), the first task is to understand, before seeking to predict or explain. Explanation without understanding has been the major weakness of many analyses of Zimbabwe’s recent postcolonial history. Dorman is aware of her own limitations in this book—chiefly the exclusion of ordinary Zimbabwean voices in her data—but her close reading of formal sources and her political ethnography manage to compensate for that deficiency. I would highly recommend this book to all students of Zimbabwe’s recent political history and to anyone interested in postcolonial African politics in general.