Tim Scarnecchia

Tim Scarnecchia is a professor of African history at Kent State. His is author of The Urban Roots of Political Violence and Democracy in Zimbabwe: Harare and Highfield, 1940-64 (University of Rochester Press). In addition to urban history, Professor Scarnecchia teaches courses on resistance and rebellion in Africa, political violence in contemporary Africa, and seminars on pan-African politics, nationalism, and comparative studies in post-emancipation societies.

Recently from Tim Scarnecchia

Editorial: In Zimbabwe Today, Politics is Violence

By Timothy Scarnecchia | 25 June 2008

In previous elections paramilitary violence came before the actual polling, usually slowing down in the week or so before polling when international election observers and the world press arrived. This has not been the case in the present elections, as violence since the beginning of May has been reported by numerous and diverse sources to be perpetrated by the police, military, and the militias under ZANU-PF control. The intention of this political violence is to terrorize, destroy, and break the will of the MDC and their supporters leading up to the June 27th run-off for the presidential election. What makes the political violence feel like such an excessively brutal betrayal this time around is that it had appeared, for a brief period in April, as if the impressive showing of the MDC in the election and the wide support it had gained would have insulated it from further reprisals from the ZANU-PF before the run-off. After all, wasn’t the world watching this time? This hope for a peaceful campaign was not to happen. As a number of the contributions to this special issue have suggested, violence is the only language ZANU-PF knows, and it has once again unleashed its complete arsenal, resulting in the killing of 50 MDC members as of May 25th, 2008, and the displacement of hundreds of people, including rural villagers, teachers, and activists.