50 Years of Transitions in Southern Africa and the Development Challenges ahead

This event is organised by Centre of Historical and Political Studies on Africa and the Middle East, Department of Political and Social Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy, and EADI Working group on “Europe and Transitions in (Southern) Africa”, and was first published here.

The year 2024 marks the 50th anniversary of a watershed in Southern African political history: the Carnation Revolution in Portugal that paved the way for the independence of Angola and Mozambique. Since then struggles to end white minority rule in South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe have been further intertwined with the Cold War dynamics and with the transformations of the development paradigms adopted by various independent countries in the region. Twenty years after those events, and in the aftermath of the Cold War, the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 represented a new political turning point at a time when a ‘globalised’ international community had shifted its approach to the prescriptions of the so called Washington (and post Washington) consensus.

Against the backdrop of these complex transformations spanning over 50 years , it is today more urgent than ever to reflect on the results of both democratization processes and development prescriptions based on market liberalization in order to grasp current and future challenges for local development and international cooperation.

Date

14-15 November 2024

Venue

Department of Political and Social Sciences University of Bologna, Italy