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Publication: "UNITA’s Northern Front in the Angolan Civil War: A Tale of Two Captivities"
The history of the Angolan civil war, and of one of its warring parties, UNITA, is largely told through the prism of the central highlands. Based on new empirical material on UNITA’s activities on the ‘Northern Front’, Jon Schubert's article looks at how UNITA sought to legitimize its fight against the MPLA government, outside its own ‘heartland’ (the central highlands), how it established control over the territory, and how the population experienced this interplay of coercion and the cultivation of consent.
Abstract
Drawing up a micro-history of the underresearched “Northern Front” of the Angolan conflict allows us to nuance recent historiography of the Angolan conflict, which focuses chiefly on how UNITA acted out its state-building project in the territories it controlled in the center and South of the country. Looking at actual practices of governance and control in the North reveals a shifting mosaic of territorial control, marked both by coercion and the cultivation of consent through the deployment of nationalist mobilization, of repertoires of stateness, and the provision of services to the population.