Chapter 6 chronicles the fragmentation of the four sets of post-liberation elites, and the purging of many established veterans between the late 1990s and ca. 2006. The chapter shows how each movement during these years was shaken to its foundations by internal criticism and major splits which pitted the leadership and a new, younger generation of loyalists against many senior liberation war cadres. Though these splits were notionally focused around questions of movement governance and leadership they were provoked by regional security crises. Indeed, in all four cases, debates on loyalty, ideological purity and movement integrity were laid on top of more long-standing disagreements on each movement’s relationship with its struggle-era regional ally. In mapping these splits and the removal of a significant part of the founding post-liberation elite from the policy arena, this chapter demonstrates how fundamentally inter-linked regional and domestic politics have been in these four states, at least with regard to relations with states governed by a one-time liberation war partner. It also underscores the degree to which gaining and maintaining office can be intrinsically destabilising – even destructive – for militarised, revolutionary movements such as those examined in this study.

This chapter explores how the four East African liberation movements transitioned into governments and begun to negotiate their place within the region. The central argument of this chapter is that the early regional relationships of EPRDF, EPLF and NRM post-liberation elites were dominated by pragmatic, domestic preoccupations, and managing tensions with, and the distrust of, regional counterparts. Revolutionary change, at least at the regional level, was therefore far from being a lodestar. Diplomatically isolated for much of its first decade in power, NRM Uganda found itself in an instantly antagonistic set of relationships with its conservative neighbours, who feared it would seek to replicate its revolution in their own territories. Seeking to allay these concerns, Kampala promoted itself as a regional conflict mediator in Somalia and vacillated in its support for the RPF, which launched its first invasion of Rwanda from Uganda in 1990. In the Horn, EPRDF and EPLF elites focused mainly on settling the question of Eritrean independence and the shape of post-liberation Ethiopia’s political and constitutional order. The elites of Ethiopia, Eritrea and Uganda first came together in the early 1990s around shared security concerns – the perceived threat from Omar al-Bashir’s Islamist Sudan – rather than ideological agendas.