Critical Junctures and Political Development: The Legacies of Liberation in Southern Africa

While social scientists have developed compelling accounts of causes and processes of social revolutions, national conflicts, and other transformative historical events, the long-term outcomes of these contentious political phenomena remain undertheorized. This paper explains political development in five Southern African countries following violent, mass-mobilizing “liberation struggles” for freedom from settler-colonial domination and building more inclusive, equitable, nonracialist nations. Today, political and social structural legacies of the twentieth-century national revolutions are characterized by sharply contrasting political regimes, social inequalities, and national cleavages. To explain these outcomes, this paper focuses on a critical juncture—defined as the liberation reform period—when revolutionary actors assumed state power and pursued diverse reform approaches, which set the countries on diverse path-dependent trajectories of political and sociological change that culminated in contrasting legacies. The analysis rethinks path dependence as dynamic processes involving both institutional stability and change—as opposed to inertia or mere lock-in—that is gradual, adaptive, and path-constrained.