Global Ideologies, Local Politics: The Cold War as Seen from Central Angola

Justin Pearce

Journal of Southern African Studies, 2017, vol. 43, issue 1, 13-27

Abstract: International rivalry in the Cold War has dominated scholarship on the post-independence war in Angola, but little research has been done on how foreign support for the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) and the National Union for the Total Independence of Angola (UNITA) had an impact on political mobilisation inside Angola. This article draws upon interviews with people who remembered the conflicts of the 1970s and 1980s in the Angolan Central Highlands, the area in which UNITA made its strongest identity-based claims against the MPLA state, and which was fiercely contested during the war. It compares these with memoirs and other secondary material that record elite perspectives on the war. I argue that ideologies espoused by the external players in Angola had little direct impact on the political affiliations of people in the contested area. Nevertheless, external support for rival movements in Angola indirectly shaped and polarised popular attitudes towards the movements, notably by providing the MPLA and UNITA with the capacity to present themselves as state-like.

Date: 2017
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/03057070.2017.1266809 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:cjssxx:v:43:y:2017:i:1:p:13-27

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/cjss20

DOI: 10.1080/03057070.2017.1266809

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Southern African Studies is currently edited by Ralph Smith

More articles in Journal of Southern African Studies from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().