Reconciliation without Justice: The State and the Invalidation of Victimhood in Post-colonial Zimbabwe, 1980–2017
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This article calls for the location of victimhood rather than political convenience at the centre of Zimbabwe’s peace-building matrix. From the attainment of independence in 1980 to the military assisted end of President Robert Mugabe’s rule in November 2017, Zimbabwe’s episodic cycles of violence were concluded through elite bargained amnesty ordinances, state mediated reconciliation pronouncements and clemency orders that unconditionally benefitted perpetrators at the expense of victims. The forgive-and-forget ethic central to these routine and fractional peace building measures, I argue, not only disregarded the rule of law but negated victimhood and rendered justice divisible. Victims of politically motivated violence could not secure redress through the courts of law against amnestied perpetrators as this would amount to double jeopardy. The government withheld prosecutorial justice against perpetrators and disregarded reparations for victims. Within the national legislative framework ordinary legislators could not move motions compelling the government to compensate survivors of violence because only the vice-presidents and ministers could move motions that had the consequence of either depleting state revenues or causing the imposition of additional taxes on citizens. Considering that ministers who had the prerogative to move such motions served in cabinet at the behest of their intractable president they could hardly embarrass or contradict their principal. Essentially, the Robert Mugabe led Zimbabwean government established legal firewalls for perpetrators of politically motivated violence which ipso facto invalidated the quest for justice by victims of the country’s ever recurring cycles of violence. This authoritarian legalism disregarded victimhood and emboldened human rights violators.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".