Regime Security Threats and African Agency: The Case of Zimbabwe

As the global order shifts toward multipolarity, attention to African agency has grown, focusing on how African nations may benefit from the opportunities created by new development partners and navigate a still unequal international power structure. While African agency is a response to external changes, it is also constrained by African states’ capacity to maintain stable political leadership and domestic order. The need to ensure regime survival leads African political regimes to view external powers as a source of ‘rents’, which implies that agency is more about protecting regime interests than benefiting national development. Using the case of Zimbabwe, this article shows that Zimbabwe’s agency in different post-independence periods was shaped by the Mugabe regime’s security threats and its means of quelling those threats. Due to the regime’s weaknesses in political legitimacy and governance, not only was agency rarely seen to benefit public interests, it also created more challenges for the regime itself. The article concludes that only by maintaining a stable political order and a legitimate government can African states take advantage of, rather than be overwhelmed by, the shifting global order to benefit the interests of the African people.