Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the politics and practices of urban governance under Zimbabwe’s power sharing arrangement, analysing the nature and effects of irregular surveillance on the everyday experiences of MDC-T urban councillors and activists in contested city spaces.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores the politics and practices of urban governance that have emerged in the course of Zimbabwe's power sharing arrangement. It examines ZanuPF's strategy for retaining authority in the cities despite losing urban democratic space to the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) parties, and explores the reconstitution of ZanuPF urban powers. These powers hinge partly on the law and ZanuPF's on-going control of the Ministry of Local Government: legal-structural changes dramatically recentralized control over local authorities, allowing the Minister to use the courts to harass and suspend MDC councillors. But ZanuPF authority also depends on an irregular politics of patronage involving a range of measures of enticement and coercion - fostering corruption, deploying proxy urban militia, developing parallel structures of authority and taxation. The paper argues that the power-sharing arrangement has allowed a façade of MDC-T control of local level urban democratic bodies, while the realities of reconstituted ZanuPF power work to undermine them. It aims to theorize the nature and effects of irregular surveillance, as it shapes calculations of risk and self-censorship, with a particular focus on the everyday experiences of MDC-T urban councillors and activists in contested city spaces controlled by ZanuPF militia.