WHA Annual Meeting: Korea 2026

This paper examines United States conservative discourses on the national liberation struggles in Zimbabwe and South Africa. It takes as its sources the publications of National Review, an influential New Right conservative magazine, and makes two main arguments. First, it contends that NR’s opposition to the liberation struggles of Zimbabwe and South Africa, as well as its support for the White-minority regimes in these states, was animated by White Supremacism and racial thinking. NR held that the “African mind” was not yet suited for democracy and prone to tribal and irrational thinking. This challenges previous studies which primarily locate New Right reticence towards southern African liberation struggles in anti-Communism and Cold War realpolitik. Second, the paper argues that in the 1980s NR revived a discourse of colonial developmentalism to oppose self-rule in South Africa. In this view, African subjects were unfit for democracy due to their socioeconomic conditions: they needed White tutelage along with free markets and free trade in order to become “rational” political actors and full citizens. This is important because it demonstrates that modern discourses of development were often imbued with the logic of colonial racism in ways that scholars have failed to account for