Publications by Fellows: Pedro Alarcon: Frelimo and the Fate of Mozambique

In a post for the Copenhagen Business School’s Centre for Business and Development Studies’ Business in Development blog, our Fellow Pedro Alarcon seeks to explain the origins and implications of the political crisis in Mozambique, triggered by the general election of 9 October 2024  in which hundreds of Mozambicans have been killed, injured or arrested.

The post provides a historical perspective to describe the structural conditions that frame the stage in which the current political crisis takes place and might or might not be solved. It underscores the configuration that regulates the relationship between state and society through state’s allocation of rent generated by natural resource extractivism. In general, rentier politics creates clientelist and patronage networks with sectors of society and co-opts oppositional forces, which might explain Frelimo’s electoral success. In particular, the Mozambican rentier state benefits local elites by transferring state resources to private pockets, Pedro Alarcon writes.

Read the post here.