Paper short abstract:

This paper explores Zimbabwean conceptions of the international, and the ways in which these sustain and inform contestations between citizens and the state.

Paper long abstract:

This paper explores Zimbabwean conceptions of the international, and the ways in which these sustain and inform contestations between citizens and the state. Such conceptions have been the subject of strident debate in recent years, with the government of President Mugabe setting forth a particular idea of Zimbabweanness rooted in autochthony and independence. Drawing on over 100 interviews with Zimbabweans, the paper outlines the ways in which Zimbabwean citizens view relations with their neighbours in Southern Africa, with China and with Britain in very different ways to those of their government, leading them to construct alternative understandings of the meaning of the state that confront the official view. The paper uses a theoretical framework that builds on communitarian understandings of the interrelatedness of states through processes of negation, projection and introjection, where negation is the establishment of self-understanding through a recognition of and by a different other; projection the denial of aggression and its identification with an alien other; and introjection the acceptance that parts of the other have entered and shaped the self.