Electoral Politics and a Farm Workers' Struggle in Zimbabwe (1999–2000)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
An extraordinarily lengthy 20-month farm labour struggle in Zimbabwe from 1998 to 2000 that became entangled in momentous national-scale politics provides insight into how electoral politics became a source of power, ambivalence and danger for these farm workers. This article analyses how leaders of this long struggle drew on electoral politics as a set of social practices, power relations and affective styles to make connections with extra-farm organisations, while compelling support among many of the farm workers. It examines how the farm workers' leaders were able to use some of the social networks and cultural politics associated with electoral politics in Zimbabwe to try to reconfigure the situation facing farm workers on a much broader scale. Both the labour struggle and emergent opposition politics in this context drew on the authoritarian style of electoral politics dominant in Zimbabwe. The linkages to wider networks within a political party, state bodies, and non-state organisations dramatically enhanced the sustainability and possibilities of this labour struggle. But they also brought hierarchies and the potential for violence. When the wider historical conjuncture shifted after February 2000, and national-scale politics began to focus on commercial farms, the ability to draw on diverse wider networks to enhance workers' demands was severely limited. This article thus provides insight into the cultural politics of opposition and ruling-party politics in relationship to farm workers during an important period in Zimbabwe's history.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".