The historical development of the modern state is marked by, among other important changes, the transformation of political legitimacy from the authority of princes to the mandate of the people, from dynastic to popular legitimacy. Since states are the creatures not only of their domestic environment but also of international society, we must distinguish between internal and international legitimacy. Martin Wight defines the latter as ‘the collective judgement of international society [i.e. other states] about rightful membership of the family of nations’. According to him, the convention of international legitimation that has predominated since 1945 is based on the combined and paradoxical principles of majority rule, which rejects the legitimacy of colonialism, and territorial integrity, which nevertheless accepts territorial divisions established under colonialism. We define internal legitimacy as the recognition of a state and its government as rightful by its population, which during the modern era has increasingly meant a popular recognition democratically expressed.

By the early 1980s, it was becoming increasingly apparent to the Frelimo Government in Mozambique that its agricultural policies were not having the required effects. Production had not recovered to pre-independence levels as intended, agricultural exports remained generally low, and there was hunger in certain areas of the country. Queues and shortages were widespread in the cities, and rationing was introduced in the capital, Maputo. There were many exogenous factors accounting for these problems: alternating years of drought and floods, a constant state of war, first against the Smith régime in Rhodesia and then against South Africa and its client groups, and finally, of course, the world recession and worsening terms of trade.

It is generally acknowledged that a policy of agrarian reform involves much more than the mere redistribution of land to obtain an equitable system of production. A parallel and essential supporting range of complementary institutions usually need to be reorganised at the same time, concerned with credit, marketing, extension, and settlement, so that they can further rather than constrain and negate the reform. The old skewed land-holding structure, especially if involving latifundia estates, has probably contributed to a particular pattern of rural settlement that is quite inappropriate to cope with the more equitable distribution of land, unless large private estates are directly converted into state or multi-member farms. The beneficiaries of reform frequently need resettling on or near their newly-acquired land, and associated co-operative agencies for equipment, inputs, and marketing, together with programmes to provide basic social and commercial services, may well call for a nucleated form of settlement to be created.

The conflict in the Horn of Africa and its internationalisation since 1977 has stimulated many arguments in Amercian policy-making circles on whether the costs of expanded involvement in the region are coming to outweigh the strategic and other benefits. The most intense phase of this controversy has followed the post-1978 realignment of forces in the region, which transformed Somalia into an ally of the United States, and Ethiopia, long a close friend, into a Soviet ally.

In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in international politics in Africa. After the initial post-independence discussion of pan-Africanism the international dimension seemed overshadowed by the concern to account for domestic developments in many new states, and it is this imbalance which is now being redressed. Indeed, it has recently been argued by Robert Jackson and Carl Rosberg that, contrary to the situation elsewhere, Africa's international politics have assumed an order which is sadly lacking in the domestic affairs of many states: ‘At the level of international society, a framework of rules and conventions governing the relations of the states in the region has been bounded and sustained for almost two decades.’ If the contrast between internal anarchy and international order seems somewhat exaggerated, the distinction between domestic and foreign politics appears both conventional and appropriate.

What is the precise nature of the relationship between the so-called Third World and the industrialised West? While a question of this sort was much more easily answered in the era of direct colonial control over vast non-European regions, there is much debate concerning the symmetry of economic and political relationships in the postindependence period. In fact, to a considerable number of observers, it is asymmetry which characterises the ties between the industrialised and ‘underdeveloped’ countries, based on a long historical process of incorporation into the western capitalist system. Political independence, these critics argue, has merely shifted a ‘colonial’ to a ‘neo-colonial’ relationship, leaving the unevenness basically intact.