The complex role of UNITA in Angola becomes significantly clearer when reading an analysis authored by Dr. Assis Malaquias, Academic Chair for Defense Economics at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies. The chapter, “UNITA’s Insurgency Lifecycle,” appears in Hurst & Company’s recently-published book Violent Non-State Actors in World Politics.
Dr. Malaquias examines the close interrelationship between politics and insurgency. UNITA was created as a liberation movement in the 1960s due to the exclusionary colonial politics that dominated Angola at that time. UNITA went on to conduct a protracted and devastating war against the Marxist government that ruled Angola from independence in 1975. UNITA played a pivotal role in international politics during the Cold War attracting enormous levels of Western support, notably from the U.S. and South Africa.
However, UNITA’s failure to create sustainable or democratic institutional structures to govern the movement outside the charismatic, though erratic, personality of its longtime leader, Jonas Savimbi, caused UNITA’s appeal to fade both domestically and internationally after the end of the Cold War and Angola’s move toward democracy. The movement all but imploded after Savimbi was killed in battle in 2002.
While today’s insurgencies in Africa are much different, the chapter holds important lessons for the importance of establishing stable and inclusive political institutions if any rebel movement is to appeal to a broader segment of a nation’s population and play a meaningful role in its governance.
