Militarisation and State Institutions: ‘Professionals’ and ‘Soldiers’ inside the Zimbabwe Prison Service

Efforts to understand Zimbabwe's recent upheavals have brought scholars into productive conversation with approaches to African politics hitherto neglected in Zimbabwe. These have included political science analyses of ‘disorder’ and ethnographic approaches to the state at its unstable ‘margins’. Such analyses have highlighted the reconstitution of power through the expansion of powerful networks inside and outside state institutions and focused attention on the social and governmental effects of uncertainty. While these approaches are very different, they share a tendency to neglect processes of change within the civil service proper. Using a study of the ‘militarisation’ of Zimbabwe's prison service, I argue that these processes are essential to understanding the nature of political transformation. Militarisation catastrophically undermined the prison service's capacity to carry out its most basic functions and divided its staff between ‘professionals’ and ‘soldiers’. Professionals embraced an historically rooted state ideal built on the value of rules and expertise. They cast both as essential attributes of statehood just as they were comprehensively subverted by the soldiers in the name of an ongoing liberation struggle. Civil servants in these two camps no longer shared a common set of norms or purposes, though they all participated to greater or lesser degrees in the ‘militarised’ practices that pervaded the service. The unequal battle over the nature of state authority that ensued was – and remains – crucial to the exercise and legitimation of state power.