Explaining Underdevelopment in East Africa in the Post-Independence Period

A country-analysis of Kenya and Ethiopia

Master's Thesis from the year 2014 in the subject Politics - International Politics - Topic: Development Politics, University of Birmingham, language: English, abstract: This paper explores the connections and gaps between underdevelopment, the colonial legacy, imported foreign practices, regimes and emerging economies, in order to understand more clearly how typical, general discourses on development continue to carry ideologically charged and historically transposed meanings. The term underdevelopment is primarily used to trace and define the retrogressive economic pattern within a given society and the corresponding postulates. Underdevelopment, however, illustrates also how the post-colonial fragility of the African economies becomes affected by internal conflicts, regional disputes, militarization and indoctrination of the masses. Beginning with a literature review and definitions of the concept, the paper seeks to investigate the multipolar problematics in Eastern Africa in the post-colonial period, with particular regard to the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia and the Republic of Kenya. These two studies aim to illustrate and contrast the contextual differences of the colonized and independent types of countries, together with their common internal and regional dynamism that cause underdevelopment to be ongoing. This paper then explores and analyzes the aforementioned states according to particular indicators and provides evidence, in which a deconstructive comparison is used to trace periodical, pre- and post-colonial realities and the state of affairs of the underperforming sectors. Moreover it will then shed light on the continuity of underdevelopment, within the context of the theorization of the given amalgam of critical factors that have been redefined over time. The thesis concludes with a summary and questions the notion of unequal development on the African continent.