East Africa after Liberation: Conflict, Security, and the State since the 1980s by Jonathan Fisher

Only a small number of Africa’s many civil wars since independence have ended with rebel victory, and an even smaller number of those victories have seen rebels transition into successful rulers able to create durable political systems that persisted for decades following the ouster of the ancien regime. In East Africa after Liberation, Fisher considers several flagship cases from the 1980s and 1990s—Uganda’s National Resistance Army (nra), the Rwandan Patriotic Front (rpf), the interlinked Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (eplf), Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (eprdf), and Tigrayan People’s Liberation Front. With compelling theoretical insight and rich empirical detail, Fisher shows how, after these “post-liberation” insurgencies won their wars, their leaders then renovated regime politics in the states that they captured and became new governing elites. He also shows how they shaped Africa’s regional politics, both in conjunction and, ultimately, at...